Unpacking Our Conversation With a Former DOGE Staffer

Vittoria Elliott: And you mentioned that everything’s over Signal. Obviously, there’s rules around maintaining records around government work if you’re a government worker. Did anyone ever talk to you about, “Hey, you have to archive these messages. Hey, you have to save these emails. Hey, you can’t delete that.” Did anyone discuss your… any legal obligations around that with you for your work at DOGE?

Sahil Lavingia: No. No. There was never any DOGE or onboarding, right. So, no communication around talking to press, not talking to press, taking photos, not taking photos, disclosing anything you’ve done with anybody. And yeah, nothing about archiving, maintaining records. It was just done on Signal, and it was never communicated like, “This is why we use Signal, for example.” It was just like, “Steven is going to call you on Signal,” and that’s about it.

Vittoria Elliott: And a lot of the DOGE engineers have been assigned to multiple agencies. Were you ever assigned to another agency outside of VA, and did you have a sense of why there were so many DOGE engineers across multiple agencies simultaneously?

Sahil Lavingia: Yeah, I was not. I was assigned to VA, and I never got detailed, I guess, is the term detailed to any other agencies. My feeling is that there were just way fewer engineers at DOGE than people would think. There were 10 or less. And so I think they were just insanely limited in how many people they could actually… If they had 500 engineers, they wouldn’t have to do that, but I think they just had so few, and specifically so few that they trusted, right. I think there probably was this maybe schism and sort of the sense that if you joined post-inauguration, you were seen as more of an external contributor volunteer. And if you joined pre-inauguration, you were taken a bit more seriously, is my guess, and just had more time to build trust with Steve and Elon, et cetera. So I think they just only trusted a very small contingent of people, so they just needed the same group of people to just run around a lot and go from agency to agency.

Vittoria Elliott: Got it. Given that you were touching possibly really sensitive data, was there any controls that were put into place? Did anyone sit you down and say, “You’re going to touch a bunch of sensitive stuff. You are or not allowed to do this.” Did you get a sense that there was any sort of, I guess, conversation at DOGE about how to handle this data, how to make sure it’s protected safely, how ensuring that people might go back to the private sector, that it’s not used for their own benefit?

Sahil Lavingia: Yeah. There was nothing DOGE-specific around that, but there were. I think it depends on the agency, and the agencies all have their own protocols that they follow. And in our case at VA, there was some data that they said, “If you want access to this, you have to go through this two-hour sort of course online where you go through a bunch of tests and have to say that you’re able to… you understand the risks.” But in terms of the HR data, I was able to get access to all the HR data, all the contracts with no… I didn’t have to sign anything or say anything that I agreed to not share it with the public or do anything like that. It is kind of implied. I was surprised, though. I mean, I was… I asked them one time. I was like, “I like how many people have access to the HR data?” And they’re like, “Basically everyone in HR.” I’m like, “You know this data has everyone’s social security numbers in it. There’s like 473,000 social security numbers.” And they’re like, “Yeah, thousands of people have access to that.” I was like, “That’s kind of weird.” And I do think the government could improve on these controls and making them better. There was one time where I got access to this thing called CDW, where… which is I think stands for the Corporate Data Warehouse, which effectively all the data in VA was in CDW at one point and they revoked my access a few hours later when they realized that someone had given me access to this and they were basically like, “Dude, why did you give him access to this?” And they were like, “Well, he’s senior advisor to the chief of staff. That’s… And our protocol is to give you access to all the data when you asked for it.” I think there was this feeling in the beginning that DOGE had a lot more power than people thought, and so everyone was just kind of doing what we asked them to do and unnecessarily that I’d be like, “No. By the way, follow your own process. I’m not asking you to do anything different.”