Engineer fired after 55 days from Elon Musk’s DOGE team shares what went wrong inside the US Government’s tech project

Elon Musk

When Sahil Lavingia joined the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was headed by Elon Musk, in March 2025, he had one goal: to write code that would help the government work better. A software engineer who had previously volunteered for Bernie Sanders, Lavingia believed in using technology to improve public services. But just 55 days later, his DOGE days were over.

In a candid and detailed blog post titled DOGE Days, Lavingia recounts his time working for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) under DOGE. What began with optimism quickly turned into frustration and confusion.Interestingly, his blog comes at a time when Musk announced that his term as the chief of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has come to an end.

“On Day 1, I was excited,” he writes. “I got my government ID and learned I’d be advising the Chief of Staff. My salary? $0.”
Despite the strange start, he got to work. His first task was reviewing federal contracts—over 90,000 of them. He built a tool using large language models (LLMs) to flag contracts that looked wasteful. He also created a dashboard to help VA staff quickly review the findings.

But working inside the government wasn’t easy.

“I couldn’t even install Python on my government laptop,” he writes. “To fix that, I needed approval from multiple levels—and it still didn’t happen.”

Lavingia also worked on a VA-specific version of ChatGPT, nicknamed VAGPT, and helped build an AI chatbot to assist veterans on VA.gov. His tools helped streamline work and reduce costs. According to one VA engineer, his contributions sped up AI adoption by a full year.

But behind the scenes, DOGE was more chaotic than he expected. It felt less like a tech team and more like “McKinsey volunteers embedded in agencies.” There was little coordination, no central knowledge base, and growing public criticism for mass layoffs that DOGE had little control over.

Then, without warning, he was fired.

After speaking about his experience with a journalist, Lavingia found his government access revoked. He was never given a clear explanation.

“I didn’t get to ship anything to production that would actually improve lives,” he wrote. “That’s the part that still stings.”
Despite everything, he says he’s grateful for the chance to contribute.

“I got to write some code for the federal government,” he concludes. “Maybe next time, I’ll get to finish the job.”