New Yorker goes deep on Musk’s DOGE days

The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells goes deep on DOGE in the weekly’s 23 June 2025 issue. With access to the usual anonymous “former DOGE staff” and “senior government officials,” Wallace-Wells follows Sahil Lavingia, a tech entrepreneur turned government employee, offering a firsthand account of the confusion and isolation inside DOGE as its employees attempted to navigate Musk's erratic leadership.

DOGE was intended to be disruptive:, with tech-savvy “DOGE kids” embedded across agencies, with promises to cancel costly diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI) contracts and eliminate thousands of government jobs (). Early signals seemed serious. Agencies braced for mass layoffs; DEI programs vanished overnight. By March, the New York Times estimated a 12 percent federal workforce cut.

However, insiders describe the outpost as leaderless and detached. Lavingia, embedded at Veterans Affairs, reported operating in the dark, “swimming where the dolphins were” based on Musk’s X posts. Ultimately, numbers failed to impress: even as DOGE’s “savings wall” boasted $180 billion, outside reporters found most claims unverifiable—confusing millions with billions, triple-counting savings, and taking credit for contracts that ended decades ago. At best, DOGE’s cuts made a modest 3 percent dent in the federal budget. Zachary Liscow, former OMB economist, noted that cutting personnel rarely yields real savings, while eroding oversight enables greater waste and fraud.

Critics from both sides—libertarians and liberals alike—agreed DOGE’s lasting legacy may be greater dysfunction, not efficiency. As Paul Light of NYU summarized, “Firing the paper pushers doesn’t fix a system, if there’s still paper to push.”