Trump's Trials - A former DOGE employee gives his account of working for the operation

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

What did the Department of Government Efficiency actually accomplish under Elon Musk? And what might change now that Musk is out? One former DOGE worker is going public and sharing what he learned.Support NPR and hear every episode of Trump's Terms sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Scott Detro and this is Trump's Terms from NPR. We're going to be doing all sorts of things nobody ever thought was even possible. President Trump has brought back strength to the White House. We can't just ignore the president's desires. This will be an entirely different country in a short period of time. Every episode we bring you one of NPR's latest stories about the 47th president and how he is trying to remake the federal government. Today's story starts right after this.

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How the Department of Education tried to fix a divided nation. Listen to Throughline wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Leila Fadl. What did the Department of Government Efficiency actually accomplish under Elon Musk? One of Musk's former Doge workers is going public with his account from the Planet Money podcast. NPR's Bobby Allen brings us his story of the first phase of the Trump administration's efforts to cut spending. Sahil Lavingia joined Doge as a techie idealist. story of the first phase of the Trump administration's efforts to cut spending.

Sahil Lavingia joined Doge as a techie idealist. He's a software engineer who wanted to improve government systems from the inside. He's not a huge Donald Trump fan, but admired Elon Musk. He knew joining Doge wouldn't go over well with everyone. Obviously, a lot of my family would not be excited about it. Most of my friends would be like, what the hell are you doing? But hopefully I could go back and be like, well, this is what the hell I did. I shipped this code and made people's lives better. And hopefully they wouldn't

stop talking to me. After about two months assigned to the Department of Veterans Affairs, he says he was able to cut some contracts and he worked on the VA's internal chat bot. But when it came to fighting fraud, a stated mission of Doge, he often fell short. Take for instance a call he got one day from one of Musk's deputies. He asked us to look into this this person who may be receiving disability payments even though they're 137. Lavengia thought okay that doesn't sound right. He made a few calls, had a longtime VA career employee dig into it. He comes back to us and says, hey, you know, this guy's in our database, he's 75.

When he passes along to Musk's deputies, he never heard back. But he says the confusion was over two government computer systems miscommunicating, not egregious fraud. I know what happened, right? Like as a software engineer who's worked on software and seen data, like, you know, some software languages, like there was a null value that then got set to 1900 or something. Lavingia was hoping for more easy wins to show Doge was really making a difference like obvious examples of government bloat or fraud that could be quickly

rooted out. One of his big takeaways is that while government is not perfect there are already many checks in place to combat waste and abuse. I mean I really believe that like we hoped there would be more fraud. That, like, I think we underrated how many checks there exist when you pay somebody. I think, actually, there is a check somewhere in the system, and that check proves, you know, make sure that they're alive, make sure that they're, you know, they've gone to a doctor's appointment in the last three months. Last month, Lavingia talked about his Doge work to the publication Fast Company.

He told the magazine that government wasn't as inefficient as he had expected. He thought he was fulfilling Musk's push for Doge to be transparent. He would say transparency was the goal, maximally transparent was the goal. And then when I tried, I got canned. The Trump administration didn't respond to a question about his termination. Later in May, Musk left Doge too, along with some of his top advisors. Doge staffers are still spread out across federal agencies, working as in-house consultants, and they're collecting and combining massive amounts of sensitive data and helping to lead

efforts to fire workers and cancel contracts. But its work is far less high profile now that Musk isn't in charge. Lavingia, for one, thinks Musk's exit means Doge will eventually just be folded into other cost-cutting efforts in the Trump administration. I don't think Trump is going to just cancel Doge, but I think it will sort of fizzle out, you know, end up with a whimper, not a bang sort of thing. The White House says cutting waste, fraud, and abuse will continue to be a goal of the administration. But in a statement affirming this mission, it left out one word, doge. Bobby Allen, NPR News. Before we wrap up a reminder, you can find more coverage of the Trump administration

on the NPR Politics Podcast, where you can hear NPR's political reporters break down the day's biggest political news, with new episodes every weekday afternoon. And thanks as always to our NPR Plus supporters who hear every episode of the show without sponsor messages. You can learn more at plus.npr.org. I'm Scott Detrow. Thanks for listening to Trump's Terms from NPR. The Nintendo Switch 2 is already the fastest-selling video game console of all time. That's despite the technology behind it lagging years behind its competitors. Without saying it, Nintendo is selling a culture. On The Indicator, we unpack the unusual business strategy that transformed a tiny Japanese

toy company into a global multimedia giant. Listen to The Indicator from Planet Money wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, it's Sarah Gonzalez. At Planet Money, when we say we want you to understand the economy, sure we mean tariffs and global supply chains and interest rates, cosas así, but also we shot a satellite into space. We made our own vodka, became a record label, made a comic book, all to help you make better sense of the world around you. Listen to the Planet Money podcast from NPR. Hi, it's Terri Gross, host of Fresh Air. Hey, take a break from the 24-hour news around you.