Inside DOGE: Silicon Valley Meets the State
NEWS | 10 October 2026
Transcript [uplifting music] Well, hello everyone. I'm Vittoria Elliott, Senior Politics Writer, and you may know me mostly from our so-called cover, of our coverage of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. And the thing is, is that there's a lot of similarities between tech and political campaigns, particularly when it comes to hype. And so when Elon Musk and Donald Trump started talking about DOGE even before inauguration, we started with simple questions. What is this? What is it gonna look like? What can it do? And these questions have led to some of our most urgent reporting on this new administration. And with me today to help give an inside look, are going to be three people who experience this firsthand. We're going to have Leland Dudek, the Acting Commissioner of the Social Security Administration, most recently. Previous to his role, he served as the Senior Advisor to Social Securities Administration's Office of Program Integrity. He led agency-wide anti-fraud initiatives, risk management frameworks, and he also served at the US Department of Interior and the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. Sahil Lavingia, the founder and CEO of Gumroad, a platform that helps creators sell products directly to their audiences. Earlier this year, he worked for DOGE as a software engineer at the Department of Veterans Affairs for just over 50 days. And George Foote, a corporate international lawyer in Washington, DC for more than three decades. He is the outside counsel for the US Institute of Peace, or USIP, and currently represents USIP's Directors in a lawsuit challenging the right of the president to remove them from office. For context... [audience claps] For context, USIP was founded by Congress and has been independently funded by Congress since 1984, and is an independent nonprofit focused on peace building. In March, it was taken over by DOGE, and the Trump administration in a move that a federal judge has since ruled was unlawful. So starting out, I wanted to start with both Leland and Sahil. You were both in contact with members of what would become DOGE, even before inauguration. What did you think DOGE would be, and at what point did you realize that's maybe not what DOGE actually was? Okay, so Vittoria, first I want to thank you and the Wired team for inviting me here. And I wanna say something that's a little off script here that I haven't cleared with Vittoria or anyone, but I want the people here to recognize the wonderful work that Wired has done since the beginning. [audience cheers and claps] Vittoria, can you please stand up? Please stand up. It's a lot of us. They are doing reporting, the best reporting in the vein of Woodward and Bernstein. They were on top of this from the beginning. I have not always agreed as administrator of a government program with what they've had to say, but I recognize they are speaking facts and giving you the truth, and that is to be commended in our society. [audience claps] And so, to answer your question, yes, I sought out DOGE. I posted about seeking out DOGE. I saw an opportunity for positive change within government, positive change where we could break through the barriers that have stymied us because of the bureaucracy we have had for such a long time. When I worked and started at in government, when, it was during the Bush administration and Barack Obama came in, and Barack Obama, I started work for Social Security. He wanted a calendar app like OpenTable so people could schedule an appointment with the Social Security Administration, like they go on OpenTable. This was 15 years ago. SSA still doesn't have an OpenTable app to schedule. They have a scheduling calendar, but nothing that, why the heck couldn't government just hire OpenTable and say, Hey, help us schedule. Help us get to our customer better. So I thought DOGE could help us do that. That's why I sought them out. I worked in anti-fraud, we had certain fraud problems. I told them the truth. I thought they could help us break through those barriers and help us get to ground truth. And I thought, gee, you've got the most powerful man in the world and you've got the richest man in the world. How can this go wrong? [audience laughs] Sahil, what did you think DOGE would be? Yeah, I guess I was excited in my personal capacity to ship code for the federal government. I actually applied for like the original DOGE, which was called the US Digital Service, which was about this idea of bringing people from tech into the federal government and modernizing it, making cool apps like OpenTable for your Social Security appointments and things like this. I applied in 2015, I guess, and I did not hear back. This is a problem the government has, is this level of sort of opaqueness to it. And then when I saw Elon and DOGE and this sort of like idea of, you know, when I talked to Steve Davis about it, he sort of said like, he wouldn't really tell me much about what it was going to do, but he sort of did posit like, you know, it, you know, is world class software built by contractors or is it built by the companies themselves, like Google? Like, do they outsource the development? And so, you know, we have an opportunity here to sort of become the software engineering firm within the federal government and sort of build state capacity, which aligned really well with what I wanted to do. Ship code, as, you know, for the federal government as a software engineer. And that was sort of like what was sort of, you know, promised to me or as sort of told to me in November, December when I talked to them. And, you know, like Sun Tzu says like, no plan survives contact with the enemy. So that's not exactly what happened. Well, and- But I do think that was, you know, part of the plan. Just for context for our audience, Steve Davis, CEO of the Boring company, frequently Elon Musk's right hand man, and from what we understood from talking to you, Sahil, someone who was really overseeing DOGE's day-to-day operations when he was in government. And to that point, you know, we will go back to Leland. At what point did you realize that that dream wasn't actually what DOGE was? So I'm a student of history and I like to understand what's going on. And it quickly became apparent to me pretty much as soon as I became the acting commissioner that this was not going to go the way that I had hoped it would go. My philosophy has been looking at the history of government and recognizing that there have been attempts in the past to bring business type practices to government. Most notably was during the Johnson and Kennedy administrations with Robert McNamara in Department of Defense. We lost the Vietnam War because of him, right? He counted bullets instead of holding onto land and the traditional metrics of warfare. He was a brilliant, Bob McNamara was a brilliant engineer from, was it General Motors or Ford that brought those practices in from business and wanted government to work that way. It didn't work in DoD. Well, this was a little bit the same. It was a hierarchy that did not understand the culture or practices of the government. Fundamentally didn't understand that government employees were not there to resist. They were there, and naturally there to be conservative because the constraints in government are such that every voice matters, every person counts. You cannot ignore the 20% or the 5% to throw an app out there or throw some practice out there to guinea pig on, on your population, see if your idea works or not. It doesn't work that way. Why? At Social Security, how many people over the age of 100 you wanna take off the death master file are you going to kill because they're not going to get a check? So you have to have those, those kinds of talks. And it's very hard to have those kinds of talks with people with that single-minded Silicon Valley, we need to hit our measures and marks, and our KPIs and just get it done. It's the constraints of government in contrast with the ability to provide a government that serves all. And how do we find that balance? My hope is they would listen and would work with us to find the edges to work through the law, not bulldoze over it and say, oh, fuck it. And Sahil, when did you sort of get the vibe that DOGE was fundamentally different than what you'd been promised in your conversations with Steve Davis? Yeah, I think the first time I was like uh-oh, it was actually still before I joined. I was, you know, DOGE is sort of like, I think of it like a bit of like a temp agency where they kind of like exist and they sort of throw people at these, you know, a couple people, you know, in these different agencies. And so I was, I, you know, they were like, Hey, we have a spot for you at VA, talked to this guy. He's like the first DOGE person there, you know, You'll be a software engineer at VA if you're interested, you know, Talk to him. So I talked to him and you know, I'm not super familiar. I'm not a student of history. I'm like the opposite, I'm an engineer, you know, so focused on the, on the future, but excited to learn about a lot of this stuff. But, and so anyway, I said awesome, like VA's huge agency, it turns out according to Wikipedia, absolutely massive. Wow, what an opportunity for software to make this stuff better, you know, also would be nice to have an app for veterans to schedule their, their appointments, et cetera, right? And so like, how many, you know, this is like a month or two into the administration at this point. So I say, how many of us are there at VA, right? Like, am I the second engineer, fifth engineer, 10th engineer. He says like, you're actually gonna be the first software engineer at VA. And that was like a little concerning and exciting in a way too, you know, like, wow, I have so much opportunity to have an impact, but also like, what the hell is like, why, like what's, why like, I thought you read the news, DOGE feels like this monster, but it turns out like, you know, like Victoria's four, you know, four boys, and maybe a few older people like me with beards. So it just was not that big. And I think that mostly stemmed from the fact that like, to get into it, you know, at the end of the day, you are working for Trump, right, sort of indirectly. And it turns out that sort of Venn diagram overlap of like software engineers, you know, who wanted to do public service, who also, like were, I'm not a Trump supporter by any any means, but didn't have a history of like, Democrat, whatnot, made it really hard, it made it almost impossible to have anyone get through that filter. So we had an interesting interaction in the green room where you told me you'd gotten dumped in VA. Wouldn't say dumped. I was honored to be there, So I'm gonna use an acronym, you love, I said VACO. And he is like, well, yeah, yeah, how'd you know? I said, because that's, if you're in Command Control, like in in the military, C4 ISR, well they put you in headquarters, but what program do you want to have an impact on? Is it national cemeteries? Is it VBA veteran benefits? Is it VHA? Oh headquarters controls all of it. They do? They do, really? And so you were placed without an understanding of where you could be most effective, and you were given a distinct disadvantage because not only did you not understand the environment, but you didn't understand the politics underneath it and the pressure from above which such to we give me the numbers now. Give me the result. And so, you know, I think that what's important, an important distinction here is for both Leland and Sahil, you were some ways sort of in the eye of the DOGE hurricane, and it can be a bit calmer in there, but this group looked very different for those not sitting in the center. And I really wanna come to you, George, because can you tell us what your first experience with DOGE looked like? Sure. And let's start by saying this, at the Institute of Peace, there was nothing governmental or efficiency about what DOGE did. DOGE arrived as the brass knuckles on an authoritarian fist to smash an organization and fire everybody in it. And that's exactly what they did. The President issued an executive order. We got a call from OMB saying, would you accept a detail from DOGE to help improve your operations? We knew by that time that was not a good idea. The two DOGE operatives showed up at the building one Friday afternoon with two FBI agents in tow with a resolution saying that the Presidentially-appointed directors had been fired, and that the remaining directors who were the secretaries of state and defense, and the President of the National Defense University had adopted a resolution that removed the acting president at the time, George Moose, and appointed a new one, Nate Kavanaugh, who was a DOGE operative. We did not let them in the building. We told 'em to go away. Over the weekend, FBI agents visited USIP employees. I got a call from the US attorney threatening me with prosecution for obstructing their entry. And on Monday we had secured the building, and DOGE showed up with the FBI and the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department. They sent our security contractors into the building with a key they had stolen. I called the police to have them removed, the police came and kicked us out. So it was a combination of the White House, and DOGE, and the FBI and the US Attorney, and our contractors and the Metropolitan Police Department acting in concert under the name of putting DOGE at USIP, that seized the building, confiscated $30 million of accounts, fired everybody in the building and terminated all the contracts. So it was not the most pleasant interaction with DOGE, and it had nothing to do with government or with efficiency. And I think, you know, this has been something that has been something that's informed our reporting a lot, is how much of this is about technology versus how much of this is about exercising power and technology as a means to do that? And I know for both Leland and Sahil, you had a lot of hopes for what could be done technologically here. But you know, for you, Leland, you mentioned when we've spoken in the past that you interacted with some of the young engineers that actually we identified at Wired. Were they interested in learning from experience civil servants? Were they interested in understanding this, and do you think they should have had access to the power that they had? Well, that's a really good question. Yes, yes, and yes. So one, we are all human beings, and we all need to, we have hopes and dreams, and we aspire, and we wanna be challenged. And there is a way to take really smart people who mean well and to incubate that talent, and we should encourage that, right? The DOGE engineers that many of you reported on, they had backgrounds, but if you look at their backgrounds, if you're looking at it from the lens of the Washington, of you know, Edward gets picked on a lot because of the name Big Balls. In fact, the number one thing I got from IRS a lot, my friends at IRS was, Hey, have you met Big Balls yet? Yeah, Edward's a kid who's really smart, and he needs someone to Sherpa him and give him guidance, and he can help move a program forward. And frankly, I do not care what he has done in the past. What I care about is his commitment to what he's doing now, and that he has sworn the same oath that I have as a federal employee. I made sure when Edward came to Social Security, when the DOGE kids that came to Social Security, I made sure they were undergoing background checks. I made sure they got the same IT security training that every SSA employee gets, including myself. I made sure they got the same ethics training, I made sure that they got the same privacy training, and I made sure that they signed the same agreement. And if they violated those rules, and it, they were, I was told about it by my IT security team, by anyone, they would be terminated and prosecuted. So I held them to the same standard as any employee. So yes, I think they should have access to it. Yes. Do I want smart people looking at files to help me weed through and improve data quality? Yes. Don't you? But I would, so I would push back on that a little bit, because you know, what we saw at least, and I wanna credit my colleagues, McKenna Kelly and David Gilbert with this reporting of DOGE's role in Social Security. You know, we saw this sort of propaganda pushed out about how there were supposedly 150-year-olds receiving Social Security benefits because of a misunderstanding of data. And while that might be an error that someone could correct or would maybe learn from someone like you to do differently, that A, doesn't sound very much like the desire to build an app to make something more efficient, but also really feeding a perception of government propagated by people in the administration and by people like Elon Musk, that there is this sort of rampant issue that doesn't exist. And I don't know if I would consider that to be, you know, a good use of those people's talents. I would agree with that as well. I wanna sort of backtrack for everyone, you know, do you see DOGE as separate from the Trump administration's agenda? And you know, I know Sahil you and I have talked about this and you know George as well, so I'd wanna keep the answers brief, but like, do you see DOGE as a separate entity from the Trump administration's agenda? I mean, in hindsight, you know, it is not separate. It's you know, it was created or modified by an executive order by Trump. And it, at the end of the day, I think this is why it turned to be such a sort of ideological thing, is because that that is sort of like what they wanted out of it, and what they got out of it. And I think it was sort of this, maybe if we do this and help you guys out with this and show you that we're smart, you'll allow us to then build a lot of cool apps for you. And obviously like this stuff is fast and quick and this stuff takes longer. And I think they just sort of got played a little bit. Yeah, I think in hindsight, at the end of the day, you know, it is like, you know, don't join the company if you're okay if you're not a fan of the CEO, right? Because at the end of the day, that's sort of the agenda that you're gonna be asked to work on. If DOGE said, Hey, we have a spot for you at ICE, you know, probably my conversation would've been, it would've gone a little bit differently. I felt pretty aligned with it. I would say that as far as Doge being separate from the government, you know, government is people, they're human beings. It's not just an entity that is off their, an automaton, and people come to government with their own agendas. There are many of the people who were recruited for DOGE, like Saul came in wanting to do good things with tech capabilities and wanting to accomplish things and lead the same thing. Elon Musk had a different agenda. He wanted to, I'm not sure exactly what he wanted to do, but he took his agenda to a destructive level. [Panelist] Me too. In the case of USIP, there was a combination of the Musk DOGE team of trying to strike government much smaller with a man named Russ Vought, who was the director of the Office of Management Budget, whose effort in the first Trump administration had been to get rid of USIP. And he tried again. And so the combination of the Musk drive to smash government and the vote intent to get rid of USIP, and the fact that USIP conducted work that Donald Trump considers to be woke and not acceptable in his government, made a combination of factors that certainly didn't bring DOGE to the party in the way that it was presented to the public, but rather brought it as the entry of an authoritarian regime. Well, and I wanted to backtrack a little, 'cause when you said you weren't necessarily sure what Musk's goal was, I heard you murmur a little bit over your style, Me too. I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about what you experienced. I know you met with Musk once, you know. Did you, you know, what was your sense of the level of organization transparency, goal orientedness around what DOGE was trying to do? Yeah, I mean, I think at that point, like I'd been there for a couple weeks, and at that point the messaging had become about this, the deficit reduction and like this trillion dollar, trillion dollars of savings. And so that kind of became like the sort of the go to Mars, the kind of the North star that would sort of align everyone to sort of maximize cost savings, et cetera. But there wasn't like a, just kinda like the fraud at Social Security stuff. Like, I think in the beginning, I think many people would've believed, oh yeah, maybe there's like a disconnect and some fraud could sneak through and, you know, if we can like sort of figure out how to connect these two data sources, we can uncover this thing. And that's great. But there wasn't like a exactly a sort of a feedback loop on like, we tried to find fraud, we failed to find it. So try harder. For example, at VA, we looked into the same thing, like all these people who are above the age of whatever, and we found some guy who's 150 years old and it turns out it was just like some error in a database and he was 75. But I would've been, what I heard was like, and I'm an outsider, I feel like these guys are a little bit more insider, that I, the the way the government works is fascinating. It's kinda like a big company that you're joining. But I just, I just didn't know like how, you know, the dynamics and incentives and all the history behind a lot of these things that at, like USIP, And at USIP, the strike team that arrived, once they cleared all the employees out, made it very clear that they had no idea about what to do with the place. The executive offices turned into a clubhouse. They ate all the food in the cafeteria and they left a half pound of weed when they left. [audience laughs] That's pretty funny. It was pretty funny. Was that reported? I feel like I haven't ever heard it. It was reported and most of the comments online were what crappy weed they had left and couldn't those guys afford something better. You know, this guy doesn't smoke weed 'cause he talks about in pounds, not ounces. [audience laughs] Well, and well, I'll come back to you for a second, Leland, but that becomes more relevant right now because in this moment, you know, after the DOGE incursion and the, you know, pounds of weed, you guys took the administration to court, the judge sided with you saying that the administration's actions were unlawful, that they didn't have the right to take over the building or fire its board members. And though USIP technically won this judgment, but this week a lot's happened. The building now bears Trump's name as of earlier this week. And today the president attended the signing of a peace agreement between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in that building. What does that tell you about this moment, knowing that you've won in court, and yet? It's pretty bitter. Let's start by saying the peace treaty that they signed to the building today is the first time that the building has been used for any substantive purpose since USIP was evicted. And by the way, that peace treaty between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo is an important thing because it deals with access to minerals without which the business plan of everybody in this room would be useless. The signing was held there because the president wants to assert control over the building and show his, put his name on a spectacular building on the National Mall. But what that shows, and what so much of this shows to me, in addition to the slow grinding of the wheels of justice to get us back in there. And we will get back in there. We're going to win this case. [audience claps] But it demonstrates how fragile the rule of law in this country is. I've practiced corporate law for a long time and I've never doubted that the laws of the United States of America were the strongest, most secure, and most assuring of a successful business opportunity of any place in the world. What this administration has done at USIP and in so many other places is show that the rule of law doesn't matter if people don't stand up and defend it. And the President is able to get away, time and again, as he is at USIP today so far, with ignoring, clouting, abusing, the rules that have made our economy and our country as strong as it is and that have made my generation as comfortable in giving us as good a life as we've had, and that threatens the lives of younger generations like so many other people in the room. So the slowness of the judicial process hurts. I wish it were going to go faster, but at least federal judges are holding the line. They are upholding the law, they're applying the law, and it will recover. Leland, I wanted to return to you, but I wanna keep us brief 'cause we're running on time. Can you tell me at what point, you know, the threat of DOGE was very apparent to George. At what point for you did you start feeling that DOGE was a threat to the Social Security Administration? Was there a moment? It was very apparent to me when, you know, that the first, when I saw what was happening to US AID, right, when I started to see at Social Security when I came in, I tried to set the right look, get the IG to investigate you, set the right foot with staff, bring in briefing teams to educate the DOGE team about what's going on. And when you come out of the briefing, the day briefing, which is an ordinary government activity, you bring in the experts of an agency, a 58,000-person agency that services, you know, $74 million, $1.4 trillion in payments a year to provide old age survivors disability insurance and SSI, and you bring the experts in the room, you say, Hey, here's what we do and why we do it. And the first things that they come outta their mouthes out of those briefings is, I need you to fire two groups. 'cause one I don't understand them. And two, the other one provides civil rights. Okay, so I work for the President, I can be fired, what do I do? My job is to execute the orders of the DOGE team who have agency at this point, they speak for the President of the United States of America. So what do I do? I recognize there's a problem. I recognize I put 'em on administrative leave, I slowly bring people back, and I start to climb, confess, and conserve. So that's when I start reaching out to the media and I start tattle tailing on myself. So yes, it was within the first week. Alright, well, we're running down on time and I wanted to come back to Sahil, because you told me the other week that you're actually back in the government. [all laughing] Can you tell our friends here a bit more? Where are you now? Yeah, I'm at USIP. No, just kidding. For the weed. Yeah, exactly. Where's that? No, so I'm here in my personal capacity. I wanna cover my as ass as, I'm learning a lot about what I need to do, but I decided through throughout this experience that I actually learned as I have said publicly before, that the government is like pretty, pretty efficient. Certainly could be, could move faster, certainly does need more technical competence. I think everyone agrees with that, nothing too crazy about that. And through DOGE and I was able to meet a lot of people and one of those, one of those guys, Sam Corcos, who's now the CIO of the Treasury, he said, Hey, you know, if I read this article you wrote about DOGE, you meant, you say maybe next time, you know, Would you be interested in helping out again? So I decided this time I wanted to join as a career employee. So I'm an IT specialist, that's the job code, you know, just a career employee. At where? Working for IRS for online accounts with the goal of, you know, less mail, less fax, more email, more push notifications, hopefully. I'm trying to make an argument for, [audience claps] do you guys, do you, I'm having a debate at work right now. Do you guys think that IRS should have a mobile app or not? [Audience] Yes. All right. I think this is a biased room. I think you might need to be in other rooms to ask that question as well. That's all DOGE needs to move forward. So your boss thinks he have a mobile app. Really? Oh, that's good to know because his the middle layers have told me it's not true. So Corcos reached out to you directly to come back? I gotta be careful. I don't know what I'm allowed to say or not. Okay. But he read my article and said, Hey, you know, If you're interested, I can like refer you to, we need help. We're working on a lot of these projects. IRS is interesting 'cause unlike a lot of agencies that do a lot of really good stuff, but they sort of do it, you know, like the IRS generates revenue, like, most of the revenue of the country comes through Treasury IRS. So there is actually kind of a budget for a software modernization that's outside of these sort of congressional acts. So I'm hopeful there's a lot of cool stuff I can do there. And I plan on being at the IRS for 10 years. That's what I told myself. 'Cause it's gonna take some time. 'Cause I've learned it can take some time, It can take some time. 55 days was not enough. I have a final question for both Sahil and Leland. And again, we're on time, so I wanna make sure we keep it brief. Do you have any regrets about sort of what you help facilitate by being part of DOGE or in your case being sort of a DOGE liaison? I think if it doesn't turn into a lot of really cool software that I get to ship for the IRS, like in five to 10 years I may look back and say that was, I should have made a lot more money doing AI stuff. [audience laughs] But I'm optimistic. I'm committed to helping the public connect with government. I'm committed to a better government that works for all. I'm committed to encouraging more people to run and join government. So, get out there and vote. Go out there and register others to vote. Go run for office yourself. If you wanna be part of this, then change the narrative. Don't just donate money and write letters. Be part of the change you wanna see in this world. And so the American people I feel spoke as part of this election, they knew what they were getting involved with. All I did was try to mitigate what I could and help. And I still remain passionate about government and about citizens, and in improving outcomes for all, especially those who are absolutely most vulnerable in our society. And the only takeaway I want you to have here is, how can we move forward? We have another three years of President Trump and you could say, well, he'll get impeached, or he'll die. Alright, then you have another three years of the Vice President, right? So how do we bridge the gap and start working together? It's time to start figuring out how to put the pieces of our democracy and real public policy conversations together in a way that makes sense. Alright, well thank you all so much for your time. Thank you for being here. Leland, George, Sahil. Thank you so much. And Vittoria. [upbeat music]
Author: Condé Nast.
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