Why I joined DOGE

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What was it like to work inside Elon Musk's DOGE? The cost-cutting initiative promised transparency, but most of its actions have been shrouded in secrecy.

For months, there were reports of software engineers and Trump loyalists entering agencies and accessing sensitive data. DOGE also helped the Trump administration lay off thousands of government workers. NPR reporters have been trying for months to get anyone from DOGE to talk on the record. Now, Sahil Lavingia, a former DOGE staffer assigned to the Department of Veteran Affairs, is speaking.

Today, what drew Sahil to DOGE and what he learned about the inner workings, in a way we've never heard before.

For more on DOGE and the federal workforce:
- The last time we shrank the federal workforce
- Can... we still trust the monthly jobs report?
- Can the Federal Reserve stay independent?

This episode was hosted by Kenny Malone and Bobby Allyn. It was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and Emma Peaslee. It was edited by Jess Jiang and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. It was engineered by Neal Rauch. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:05.8	There is this story that seems to have repeated itself over and over the last five months.
0:11.9	In some federal agency, longtime employees notice that somebody is inside the computer system,
0:17.7	requesting access to data, trying to publish new computer code, possibly
0:21.6	breaking a government website. What the employees learn is that someone from the Trump
0:26.6	administration's secretive cost-cutting effort known as the Department of Government
0:30.8	Efficiency has arrived. I think there's so few details, right? It's a big story, you know,
0:37.1	Trump, Elon Doge, but you don't really know exactly,
0:40.3	like, what are they doing? And that's kind of scary, right?
0:43.2	Sahil Lavingia is able to fill in some of those details because he was one of those people,
0:49.3	requesting access, trying to push code, and terrifying federal employees as a member of Doge.
0:55.6	We've all been watching this from afar, the dramatic headlines, the lawsuits, the concerned
0:59.6	members of Congress, and today we are going to get to see Doge from the inside, from the software
1:05.2	engineer who made the decision to join that group.
1:08.7	I was like, yeah, I think obviously like a lot of my family would not be excited about it.
1:12.5	Most of my friends would be like, what the hell are you doing?
1:14.7	But hopefully I could go back and be like, well, this is what the hell I did.
1:18.2	I shipped this code and made people's lives better.
1:21.4	And hopefully they wouldn't, you know, stop talking to me.
1:25.6	Hello and welcome to Planet Money.
1:27.2	I'm Kenny Malone.
1:28.0	And today I'm joined by NPR correspondent Bobby Allen, who has been part of the NPR team covering Doge.
	...

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