Without the billionaire Elon Musk under the government of US President Donald Trump, his project to reduce government efficiency (Doge) department (Doge) is likely to be interrupted, a former department employee assessed in his first interview since leaving the team.
He announced it on Wednesday night that he was ending his period as, but promised that Doge will continue without him. The department has supervised staff cuts in almost all federal agencies as part of US President Donald Trump’s attempts to shake federal bureaucracy.
However, software engineer Sahil Lavingia, who spent nearly two months working for the Pro-Musk technology group, said he hoped the doge “disappear” quickly.
“He will simply die,” Doge -fired Lavingia told Reuters.
“Much of the appeal and fascination was in Elon,” he adds.
According to him, Doge employees should “simply stop appearing to work.”
“It’s like children who join a startup that will leave the market in four months,” he said.
That would go, that according to the initial promises of Musk would cut $ 2 trillion in federal spending. Instead, the department estimates that its efforts have saved about $ 175 billion so far, and group calculations are full of errors.
Lavingia, 32, founder and CEO of the Gumroad creator platform, said he was recruited by Doge through personal contact and joined the team in March.
Although it is proud of certain achievements in the VETteran Department of Affairs (VA), including the modernization of the agency’s internal chatbot, admits that it often did not know that I work to do.
“I arrived at the va with a HP laptop. What should we do? What is the script?” Lavingia said he asked unsuccessfully. “I felt like you’re being deceived.”
The White House, VA and Musk did not respond to requests for comments.
The White House had previously said that Doge works at a rapid pace to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse and generate economies for US taxpayers.
When the instructions arrived, Lavingia reports, they were usually communicated by calling or small chats in the Signal Encrypted messaging app, which usually erased automatically in one day.
Lavingia stated that instructions included accelerating mass layoffs at VA, the second largest agency in the federal government.
The only time he found Musk was at a general meeting in March with what he estimates to be between 40 and 60 Doge team colleagues.
Lavingia says he suggested making part of his open source computer code available for free, which, he reports, would have had the agreement of Musk.
He then asked if Doge’s meetings could be broadcast live to increase transparency.
“Elon said, ‘This is a great idea. We’ll do it next week.’ Then he contained himself and said, ‘Maybe we pre-brave because of safety risks.’
Lavingia claims to have never received an answer.
In early May, after talking to Fast Company about work at Doge, Lavingia noticed that his computer access was revoked, which was equivalent to a resignation. According to the former employee, Musk and team leaders have never explicitly told him that he should not talk to journalists.
“My days at Doge are over,” Lavingia wrote on a blog about his experience.
