Welcome back to Tech Brief. Today, we’re diving into Sahil Lavingia’s whirlwind 55 days inside DOGE, Elon Musk’s temporary task force inside the Department of Veterans Affairs. Lavingia, founder of Gumroad and early Pinterest hire, signed on as a volunteer software engineer earning zero dollars. He expected a slow-moving bureaucracy but found seniority and veteran status dictated layoffs long before performance reviews. As Lavingia put it, “DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the ‘fall guy’ for unpopular decisions.”

During his stint, he built open-source tools to scan contracts and analyze PDFs for DEI language, yet he lamented, “I was never able to get approval to ship anything to production that would actually improve American lives.” On day 55, after speaking to Fast Company about his work, “I got the boot from DOGE,” he wrote. His takeaway? The VA isn’t as inefficient as rumored, but modernizing a 473,000-employee agency isn’t a startup sprint.
Link to Article