Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia said his biggest surprise after joining the Department of Veterans Affairs through DOGE was that the government worked—and seemed less inefficient than he had expected. He also found a meeting-heavy culture, slow decisions and fewer easy fixes than he had hoped for. That is one software engineer’s account of working at the VA, not a measure of government efficiency overall.
Who was the DOGE operative, and where did he work?
Lavingia, the founder of Gumroad, says he joined DOGE on March 17, 2025, as a software engineer assigned to the VA. In his May 28 retrospective, he described his title as Senior Advisor to the Chief of Staff and his salary as $0. Fast Company had interviewed him about the role earlier that month. Fast Company and Lavingia’s account provide the details.
His immediate impression was mixed: he did not describe the agency as effortless or fast-moving, but he said it functioned better than he had expected. In the May 8 Fast Company interview, he said, “I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions.” He added, “But honestly, it’s kind of fine—because the government works,” and said, “It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.”
What work did Lavingia say he did at the VA?
In his retrospective, Lavingia listed several software efforts: a script and deployed tool intended to flag contracts for review, tools to visualize the organization chart, work on modernizing the VA’s internal chatbot VAGPT, and a demonstration of a chatbot for VA.gov. These are projects as he described them; his account does not independently establish their impact or that each became an operational service.
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He said his organization-chart visualization represented 473,000 VA employees and that more than 90,000 active contracts—from IT support to landscaping—were the potential pool for his proposed review tool. Those figures are from his 2025 retrospective, not current agency-wide counts or evidence of savings.
Lavingia also said he built prototypes but did not receive approval to ship production changes that would improve veterans’ services. He described practical obstacles, including a restricted government laptop that made installing or using tools difficult, and concluded some underlying problems would require congressional action rather than software alone. He also said he learned the VA had consolidated HR data and already had software work underway. In his view, DOGE was less a cohesive team than a group of volunteers embedded across agencies.
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What did other reporting say about the proposals?
WIRED’s April 4, 2025 report described Lavingia as an adviser to the VA chief of staff and reported concerns from VA employees about proposals involving AI-assisted code and changes to sensitive systems. Those are concerns attributed to employees and sources WIRED interviewed; the report does not establish that a data breach occurred. WIRED’s reporting also included an employee’s statement that the VA supports more than 400 veteran-facing forms and that about 10 percent were digitized. That was a contemporaneous employee estimate, not a verified current agency-wide measure.
What happened after the interview?
Fast Company’s May 28 update said Lavingia reported that participating in its interview cost him his position. In his own May 28 account, he said his access was revoked soon after the interview appeared. These reports describe the sequence and Lavingia’s explanation; they do not establish a broader finding about why his access ended.
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In the interview, Lavingia described DOGE’s role in placing him at the VA this way: “They just sent me to the VA,” he said.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What his experience does—and does not—show
Lavingia’s account answers the headline’s question as a personal observation: he expected easier efficiency gains, but found an agency he considered functional, alongside slow decisions and constraints on what he could put into production. WIRED’s reporting adds contemporaneous employee concerns about some proposals, not an independent efficiency scorecard.
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Neither his experience nor the cited reporting establishes how efficient government is overall, how much the proposed work saved, or whether it improved veterans’ services. The reported projects and figures should be understood with their attribution and dates, rather than treated as current performance measures.
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