Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia discusses working as a DOGE software engineer for the VA and says he was let go after his Fast Company interview was published
Gov't tech workers I spoke to went bonkers when DOGE workers began connecting non-government laptops to their systems. … Jacob Harris / @jacobharr.is : Reading Sahil Lavingia's blog post about working for DOGE and it's just painful how little any of them bothered to learn anything about civic tech. Silicon Valley types thinking they're the first people to name problems and solve them — sahillavingia.com/doge Quinta Jurecic / @qjurecic : the idea that publishing the code that DOGE engineers were working on would help fix negative public perceptions of DOGE is kind of fascinating in how thoroughly it misses the point sahillavingia.com/doge [image] John Skiles Skinner / @skiles : One DOGE person actually believed that DOGE was about government software modernization. He kept talking about it. So they fired him. Ernie Smith / @ernie.tedium.co : Sahil Lavingia writes about his DOGE experience. He says my interview with him, published in Fast Company, cost him his position. — “In the end, I learned a lot, and got to write some code for the federal government. For that, I'm grateful. But I'm also disappointed.” — sahillavingia.com/doge Philip Bump / @pbump.com : Absolutely love that this DOGE flunky's mewling justification of his work starts with his talking up that he wished there had been a voter-canvassing app in 2016 — which there was. But this is the pattern: know nothing and assume you are ahead of the game. — sahillavingia.com/doge [image] Robinson Meyer / @robinsonmeyer : This is an interesting retrospective by a former DOGE software engineer who caucused for Bernie in 2016. It suggests that DOGE's structure and chain of command were unclear within the department. There are some echoes of Obama-era frustrations about government tech, too. — sahillavingia.com/doge Anil Dash / @anildash.com : The evidence here is very simple: if you go into DOGE actually trying to improve efficiency, and then try to work transparently and report the truth that existing government teams are functioning very efficiently already, they will can you. sahillavingia.com/doge Mastodon: Bret Mogilefsky / @mogul@hachyderm.io : TL;DR: “I discovered that all I did was help fire a bunch of the people actually doing the work to improve stuff” - anon recent colleague — https://sahillavingia.com/doge Threads: @ben.werdmuller : I personally don't think his decision to join DOGE was defensible, but there are lots of interesting details in Sahil Lavingia's diary of the 55 days he worked there. https://sahillavingia.com/doge X: Camilo Moreno-Salamanca / @camilomoresala : This is a must read. I've been fairly critical of DOGE, mainly on the grounds of how it is framing the problem, its impact, and its shameless misinformation. But I think it's equally important to highlight the work of people like Sahil, who went in earnestly and tried to make Sheel Mohnot / @pitdesi : great read on DOGE. Sahil worked there for $0. They had no real authority, actual firings came from agency heads. Govt rules made RIFs prioritize seniority over performance (crazy, classic govt inefficiency) He got let go for talking about it publicly. Sahil Lavingia / @shl : What the current veteran's customer support experience is like (and what could be): [video] Marty Markenson / @martyamark : Really interesting perspective of what it was like working for doge. The most amazing part is they got people like @shl to work for the government for free. Imagine if that trend can continue... Sahil Lavingia / @shl : It was an honor to serve for those who've served 🫡 [image] Austen Allred / @austen : Seems like it would be nigh impossible to have a reasonable and effective RIF with these conditions. Performance being a tie-breaker three layers down explains a lot. [image] Matt Popovich / @mpopv : The big takeaway here is that the government should be open sourcing almost everything [image] Rajeev Mantri / @rmantri : A must read - it is amply clear that reforming government and bringing efficiency in the public sector cannot be done by slash and burn tactics. Sahil Lavingia / @shl : My experience working as a software engineer for the Department of Veterans Affairs, on behalf of DOGE. https://sahillavingia.com/doge Pascal Thibeault / @pascalthibeault : “The reality was setting in: DOGE was more like having McKinsey volunteers embedded in agencies rather than the revolutionary force I'd imagined. [...] In reality, DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump [...]” Forums: r/fednews : Good on you that you learned that VA is not as inefficient as you initially thought and VA GPT is terrible. r/VeteransAffairs : DODGE staff outlines experiences at VA than gets fired!
Context & Ripple Effects
DOGE’s staffing and operating model had already raised accountability questions: staff were reportedly told to stop using Slack during a move into the Executive Office of the President, a shift that reduced routine records-access expectations.
This account adds an inside view from the VA as DOGE’s intervention coincided with institutional strain elsewhere, including the reported near-total departure of the Defense Digital Service after it was sidelined by DOGE efforts. The Defense Digital Service exodus makes the VA episode more consequential than an isolated personnel dispute.
First-order effects
- Lavingia says media attention to his Fast Company interview was followed by his termination, immediately removing a DOGE engineer from the VA assignment and making public discussion a visible personnel risk for other participants.
- The reported use of non-government laptops and criticism of DOGE engineers’ civic-tech familiarity sharpen scrutiny of the operational safeguards around the VA work.
Second-order effects
- DOGE and host agencies face a trade-off between recruiting high-profile technology operators and constraining their public accounts; tighter communications and device controls would be the most direct response.
- Existing government digital-service teams may have less incentive to cooperate with or remain alongside externally driven reform efforts when their roles and technical practices appear contested.
Third-order effects
- If similar episodes recur, federal technology modernization could become more centralized and politically managed, with less durable collaboration between embedded private-sector engineers and career digital-service capacity.
- The underlying test is whether rapid, embedded engineering can meet public-sector requirements for security, records, and institutional knowledge; failure to do so would favor more formal oversight over ad hoc deployments.
The trend: DOGE is part of a broader push to embed private-sector engineering talent inside government, where speed-oriented operating norms increasingly collide with public-sector accountability and continuity requirements.