Without Musk, DOGE likely to fizzle out, says ex-staffer

(Reuters) -Without billionaire Elon Musk in the Trump administration, his cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency project is likely to sputter out, a former DOGE staffer said in his first interview since leaving the team.

Tesla CEO Musk announced on Wednesday evening that he was ending his time as a special government employee but vowed that DOGE would continue without him. DOGE has overseen job cuts at nearly every federal agency as part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempts to shake up the federal bureaucracy. 

However, software engineer Sahil Lavingia, who spent almost two months working for the group of pro-Musk technologists, said he expects DOGE to quickly “fizzle out.” 

“It’ll just die a whimper,” Lavingia, who was fired from DOGE earlier this month, told Reuters. “So much of the appeal and allure was Elon.” He said he expected DOGE staffers to “just stop showing up to work. It’s like kids joining a startup that will go out of business in four months.”

That would cap a remarkable undoing for DOGE, which Musk initially vowed would cut $2 trillion in federal spending. Instead, DOGE estimates its efforts have saved around $175 billion so far and the group’s tallies have been riddled with errors.

Lavingia, the 32-year-old founder and CEO of creator platform Gumroad, said he was recruited by DOGE through a personal contact and joined the team in March. 

While he said he was proud of certain achievements at the Department of Veterans Affairs, including modernizing the agency’s internal artificial-intelligence chatbot, he said he was often at a loss about what work he was expected to do.

“I got dropped into the VA with an HP laptop. What are we supposed to do? What is the road map?” Lavingia said he asked, to no avail. “I felt like I was being pranked.”

The White House, the VA and Musk did not respond to requests for comment. 

The White House has previously said that DOGE works at a fast pace to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, and generate savings for American taxpayers. 

Lavingia said Steve Davis, the president of Musk’s tunneling enterprise the Boring Company, ran day-to-day operations while Turkish-born venture capitalist Baris Akis helped with DOGE recruitment and DOGE logistics. Davis and Akis did not respond to requests for comment sent via the White House. 

When instructions did come through, they were usually communicated through phone calls or small chats on the encrypted Signal messaging app that would typically auto-delete in one day, Lavingia said. 

Lavingia said instructions included moving faster to increase mass layoffs at the VA, the federal government’s second-largest agency.

The only time he met Musk, Lavingia said, was at an all-hands meeting in March with what he estimated was between 40 and 60 fellow DOGE staffers.

Lavingia said he asked to open-source, or make freely available, some of his computer code, which Musk approved. 

He then asked if they could livestream DOGE meetings to increase transparency. 

“Elon said: ‘That’s a great idea. We’ll do it next week.’ He then caught himself and said: ‘Maybe we pre-record it because of security risks.'”

Lavingia said he never heard back. 

In early May, after he spoke to media outlet Fast Company about working at DOGE, Lavingia said his computer access was revoked in what amounted to a firing. He said Musk and team leaders never explicitly told him he should not talk to journalists. 

“My DOGE days were over,” Lavingia wrote in a blog about his experience. 

(Reporting by Alexandra Ulmer in San Francisco; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

By Alexandra Ulmer