Whenever one thinks of the Department of Government Efficiency, a.k.a. Doge, it can't be accused of dragging its feet.

It was established by executive order on January 20th, and now less than six months and

more than a quarter of a million job cuts later, both supporters and detractors suspect the

federal government will never be the same again. From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris

Boyd. Elon Musk stepped away from Doge a few weeks ago,

and he has since had a nasty, quite public falling out with President Trump. But if the whole

point of the exercise was about making truly disruptive changes to how government works,

Trump's selection of a mercurial billionaire mega donor with no government experience makes a certain sort of

sense. Benjamin Wallace Wells is a staff writer at The New Yorker who's been tracking Musk's rampage at

Doge and what is left behind. His article about this is titled Move Fast and Break Things. Benjamin,

welcome back to think. It's great to be with you. As one example of how

Doge's actions have played out, you introduced us here to a guy who had admired Elon Musk's

career, thought he might want to contribute to any effort to make government more efficient. So he

gets connected to a Doge recruiter and got hired with lightning speed.

What was the interview process this guy described to you?

This is a man named Sahil Lavingia, who is a founder of an e-commerce company called,

called Gum Road. He's a tech guy in New York. It was rapid fire. He had four interviews with various people in the kind of

Doge loose hierarchy, the Doge apparatus maybe. None of them lasted much more than five minutes.

He said that the basic question was, when can you get to D.C. to start? And, you know, at one point he was asked whether he could code.

He could.

He said yes.

And so there was maybe some minimal vetting and that he had, you know, kind of come in through

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