Vittoria Elliott: Can you tell me about your interactions with the other DOGE people? Did you make friends? Did you make colleagues-
Sahil Lavingia: Yeah.
Vittoria Elliott: ... at least? Do you know... What was your relationship with the other DOGE people, and what were your impressions of them?
Sahil Lavingia: It was pretty friendly. I mean, it was kind of joining a little troop. We were working together 12 hours a day, and we laugh and joke and you had to because a lot of the work itself was pretty boring, to be honest. Reviewing contracts and sitting in on government meetings can be quite boring and frustrating sometimes. Not writing code, for example, can be annoying if you're a software engineer. So yeah, I feel like we were pretty friendly. Unfortunately, when I left, basically all communications ceased. I tried to talk to them. They're just like... I don't know if they were told or if they're just the default implicit promise of if you're working at DOGE, you don't talk to anybody who, once they've left, they've kind of left the church. I was sort of ex-communicated like, "Don't talk to this person." Surprisingly little, honestly, communication with the other non-VA DOGE people because they are so worried about maybe information leakage or something like that. They kind of don't... You think you're joining the group, but you're really joining a subgroup of a subgroup of the group. And then, every once in a while, we'd have what Steve called an E-meeting, quote, unquote, which was kind of like a meeting with Elon, and we'd all kind of meet, and it would be this sort of candid Q&A. That was not very goal-oriented. It wasn't like, "Okay, let's work." It was kind of like a non-work meeting.
Vittoria Elliott: Can you talk a little more about who was there and what your impressions of them were? It sounds... I remember, when we talked, you really expressed being sort of a true believer in the sort of mission of USDS/the new mission of DOGE, which it was or the mission of DOGE as transmuted through USDS, which is making things more efficient, using technology for these reasons, but ultimately kind of a believer in government in a way.
Sahil Lavingia: Yeah, totally. I think the meaning overall was more quiet than I was expecting. I was seeking feedback from other people, and I guess the non-feedback I got was it just showed that people joined DOGE for a bunch of different reasons, and I think my reasons for joining DOGE were not aligned as much as I was expecting with the general thrust of the organization and of the other folks who were there. Some people were just really pro-Trump, just really wanted to help Trump do what he wanted to do, whatever that meant. Some people were really fiscally conservative, like libertarian types where they really felt like they wanted to just... any opportunity to cut the size of the federal government didn't really matter exactly what it was a good thing. And I think that's generally sort of Elon's probably thrust. Elon is not as much as I was expecting a software sort of activist. So I still don't really know because I think if Steve had told me in that call, "Our goal is to use software to cut this out to the federal government as much as possible," then I wouldn't have joined. I joined because it was like, "We're going to be the software engineering firm for the US government." So maybe there was just a loss in translation thing, or maybe they needed to say what they needed to say so that they could hire people like me. I don't know. But yeah, I think what I got out of that meeting, most people were non-technical there. Most people were not software engineers. Most people there were there, and if you're not, I assume you're not that interested in using software to make the government more efficient necessarily. So yeah, I think I was a little bit naively optimistic about how aligned DOGE would be with my stance and with the core sort of original USDS. It wasn't necessarily that people were unopposed, but they were like, "This is not the highest priority thing." I messaged someone at GSA who's sort of in charge of that, and I said, "Hey, I would love to work on this project. I could migrate this whole thing to tailwind, and it would be so much easier for people to work on." And it was just like, how does this correlate to... who's going to do the work? Basically, it was always the first question. I would always say, "Well, I will do it. I'm happy to do the work." But it wasn't clear if you wanted to suggest anything to Steven or Elon how you were to do that. I made some suggestions in that meeting, even though the suggestions seemed to be well received, they were not really implemented. One was implemented, but most were not, and I got negative feedback from someone saying, "Hey, you shouldn't use that meeting for that purpose. That's not what this meeting is for. You kind of hijacked the meeting to talk about your own personal agenda." But really I thought my personal agenda was to make DOGE more successful. So I didn't think it was misaligned there in that way. But yeah, I think I learned over time that basically you're hired to do a certain thing and not to question whether you should be doing that thing or not.