Sahil Lavingia, the former member of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) first identified by WIRED, has a new job in government at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Lavingia joined the IRS in November. In a conversation at WIRED’s Big Interview event with former acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA) Leland Dudek and David Foote, outside counsel for the US Institute of Peace, Lavingia said, “I’m working at IRS for online accounts.”
The Big InterviewWIRED’s iconic series returned to San Francisco with a series of unforgettable, in-depth live conversations. Check out more highlights here.
Lavingia said that he joined as a career employee after Sam Corcos, a DOGE operative and the chief information officer of the Treasury Department, reached out to him after reading an article he’d written about his experience in government, offering to put him in touch with people who could help him find a role in which he could put his talents to use as a federal worker. When he asked the Big Interview crowd whether the IRS should have a mobile app, attendees enthusiastically said it should.
Lavingia was previously assigned to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), was part of a group of technologists brought into the government in the early months of DOGE’s takeover.
In 2015, he had applied to be a part of the US Digital Service (USDS), now the US DOGE Service. Like many DOGE technologists, he had no previous experience in government or in the specialized work of the agency to which he was assigned; he is the founder and CEO of Gumroad, a platform where creatives can sell their work.
At the VA, Lavignia attempted to use an AI tool to write code for the agency’s systems and suggested the agency move away from paper forms entirely. He built a tool to “munch” data about the agency’s contracts to identify those that could be cut.
He was fired from his role at the VA in May after he spoke to a reporter about his work at DOGE. Lavingia told WIRED at the time that he really believed in the role of technology to try and make government services better, but he quickly became disillusioned with DOGE’s lack of organization and transparency, noting that Steve Davis, Musk’s right-hand man and CEO of the Boring Company, appeared to be the only person communicating across DOGE teams at various agencies.
Through his work at the VA, Lavingia came to find that the DOGE narrative around the government as inefficient and government workers as ineffective to be largely false, noting that many problems were not due to a lack of technical expertise, but to complicated legal and policy requirements.
“The government is pretty efficient,” he said. “Could move faster.”
While the strike force that characterized DOGE’s early months has largely subsided, many DOGE operatives remain in government, often with full-time jobs inside federal agencies.
Lavingia said that he anticipates working for the government for the next 10 years, and that his work will focus on modernizing software for taxpayers. If it doesn’t work out, he said, perhaps he’ll look back and say “I should have made a lot more money doing AI stuff.”
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