cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/30882562
A former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency says that he found that the federal waste, fraud and abuse that his agency was supposed to uncover were “relatively nonexistent” during his short time embedded within the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was,” Sahil Lavingia told NPR’s Juana Summers.
Lavingia was a successful software developer and the founder of Gumroad, a platform for online sales, when he joined DOGE in March. Lavingia said he had previously sought to work for the U.S. Digital Service, the technology unit that was renamed and restructured by the Trump administration. He told NPR that he just wanted to make government websites easier for citizens to use and didn’t really care which presidential administration he was working for, despite protests from his friends and family.
Its laudable to try and remove political considerations from the job you take but in the case of working for DOGE (or other obviously political organizations) you’re either willfully condoning their actions or trying to pretend you’re not condoning their actions to cover your ass.
I’d prefer a neutral engineer at DOGE to a MAGA engineer, though.
how are you neutral at the fascist government branch?
As much as government run things are much maligned. In my experience they run with high quality and efficiency. I think people complain because of the lack of options. You can’t easily go to a competitor (because if you could half the us would move).
Veteran here. There is DEFINITELY waste in the government, but this DOGE bullshit is not the way to correct it.
What we need to is contract auditors from relevant portions of the private sector. For example, military and federal hospitals need to bring in the same inspectors that are doing quality assurance for civilian hospitals. To some extent that’s already happening, but in a stupid way: “joint commission is coming, get your department ready for inspection!” …inspections should ALWAYS be with no notice.
But yeah, some dipshit with no medical experience saying “THE VA IS WASTING MONEY, LET’S FIRE THE PEOPLE RUNNING THE VETERAN SUICIDE CRISIS HOTLINE!!” isn’t just dumb, it’s actively running against the interests of the US.
The “we support our troops!” party sure seems to fucking hate our troops.
…anyway, same spiel for the Department of Agriculture, or Education, etc: bring in people with the expertise to actually identify waste and address the root cause; don’t just rape the entire federal workforce and then pretend to be saving money.
Fucking traitors.
