GEOFF BENNETT: Billionaire Elon Musk has returned to his business ventures full time after leaving the White House and his role with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency at the end of last week.

Musk has continued to break with his former boss over the budget bill being debated in Congress right now, writing on his social media platform today -- quote -- "This massive outrageous pork filled congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination."

The White House and Republican leadership on Capitol Hill rejected Musk's concerns.

During Musk's tenure in the Trump administration, DOGE was tasked with gutting the federal work force and publicizing its cost-cutting efforts.

Our White House correspondent, Laura Barron-Lopez, has more from a former DOGE staffer who is now speaking out about his short-lived experience.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Sahil Lavingia spent 55 days working for DOGE, specifically within the Department of Veterans Affairs as a software engineer.

Last month, he was let go after speaking to a reporter.

He says he was given no clear reason for his termination.

Since then, Sahil published a diary of his time working in the department, chronicling what he did and didn't accomplish.

Sahil joins me now.

Sahil, thank you so much for being here.

You joined DOGE in mid-March as a volunteer employee.

Can you start by telling us what you were brought in to do?

SAHIL LAVINGIA, Former DOGE Staffer: Honestly, at the time, I didn't know exactly what I was brought in to do.

I learned on day one what really I was going to do, which was to help cut contracts, to help build org charts to visualize the organization, and hopefully to spend a lot of my time shipping code as well.

And as a software engineer, I was hoping that I could come in and effectively build software in-house and also ideally hire some more software engineers in-house, make the federal government more competent.

And, technically, while we were making progress, VA was kind of surprisingly efficient in a way.

It was not as easy of a battle as we were expecting.

Software engineers tend to have a saying, we don't do things because they're easy.

We do things because we thought they were going to be easy.

That's kind of what happened at VA. LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: So, throughout your time there, what was the overall mission of DOGE and how involved was Elon Musk or not in the day-to-day operations?

SAHIL LAVINGIA: There's sort of three legs of this stool, the first one being cutting contracts with federal government contractors.

Generally, you tend to have pretty expensive contracts for relatively mediocre software.

Then helping reduce the work force by that sort of 15 percent, though I learned later that DOGE doesn't really have any authority to do that.

And then the last one, the one that I was most excited about, was to actually ship software, to actually write new code, build new software that would allow us to save the government money, find waste, fraud, and abuse, these sorts of things.

Day-to-day, Elon was not super involved, at least from my perspective, at the VA. LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: You have said that you were disappointed because, at the Veterans Affairs Department specifically, you were unable to speed up veterans disability claims or make it an overall better experience for them.

Was that due to staff cuts?

What exactly made that so difficult?

SAHIL LAVINGIA: I think, at the end of the day, shipping software for the federal government was always going to be this big uphill battle.

And 55 days is just not a lot of time to do those sorts of things.

I think I would have been able to do those sorts of things over the course of 18 months, so for the course of the time frame that DOGE has been given to make a lot of these changes.

But, in my short time there, I was not able to do much.

Right now, it takes 133 days to process a claim.

Physically, you have to go get a test.

You have to get this paperwork.

You have to go find this thing.

And there's just a lot of different places where this data lies that you have to get it from.

A lot of these places don't talk to each other easily.

They speak different languages and different formats.

But the software is generally - - turns out not to be the bottleneck.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Elon Musk repeatedly said that DOGE was trying to seek out fraud, get rid of fraud, and that, in order to do that, DOGE needed access to sensitive government databases that has information millions of Americans or government workers.

At Veterans Affairs, did you find any examples of fraud?

Were you given access to sensitive government databases?

SAHIL LAVINGIA: I mean, I think it depends on what you consider sensitive.

As part of -- I was the -- my role at VA was senior adviser to the chief of staff.

So I did have access to, for example, like the H.R.

data, but I didn't have access to a lot of other information.

In terms of fraud, generally, we didn't find any examples of fraud, fraud meaning someone who broke the law, who was getting money they shouldn't have been getting.

We did have one case where we were asked to look into something.

We were asked to look into someone who I think some other agency or something found out was 137 years old.

But we looked into it.

And in our systems, the health records showed that they were 75.

So, in our case, specifically at VA, we did not find actually any.

We were given one potential.

That turned out to be zero.

We didn't find any examples of fraud, which is great, right?

That's great news for the American taxpayer.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Do you think that DOGE and staffers like you, I know you only worked there for 55 days, but staffers across DOGE should be getting access that you're getting to sensitive government data, to data on Americans?

Because there are some Americans who have voice frustration with lawmakers about the access that DOGE is getting.

SAHIL LAVINGIA: I think if people are given access to sensitive data, then that access -- like, there should be a log of that access.

Like, I think it should be very clear to everybody like who's getting what access and why.

And I think a lot of the frustration that Americans are voicing, because they don't know, right?

I think they would feel much more comfortable if they actually saw all the paperwork I had to fill out and all the forms I had to fill out and the data that I actually had -- and was able to see, and you can make your own determination.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Elon Musk and President Trump say that DOGE's work is going to continue, even though Elon Musk is leaving as a special government employee.

What do you think the future of DOGE will be?

And who is exactly in charge?

SAHIL LAVINGIA: I have no idea.

To be honest, even when I was there, it was unclear who was in charge.

At the end of the day, I guess Trump is in charge.

But I think DOGE will continue to do what it was doing, which, frankly, to me wasn't that exciting.

We were sitting in on a lot of meetings around contract review, making sure that we weren't overspending on these big federal I.T.

contracts.

I think that should continue and will continue.

I guess there is this reduction in force that's taking place over the federal government that the VA has said that they're going to participate in.

It was moving incredibly slow.

I think, at VA specifically, more people were hired than fired during my tenure.

I hope DOGE ships a lot of software.

Unfortunately, I think the admin appetite for shipping software, instead of just cutting things, is relatively low.

Maybe that's partly why Elon and co. are parted ways in the last week or so.

So I assume that won't really happen, but I would be very gracious as an American if paying taxes became easier, if the sort of broad experience of dealing with Social Security improved, et cetera.

So I wish them the best of luck, but they just don't have a lot of resources to do what they set out to do in the beginning.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Sahil Lavingia, thank you for your time.

SAHIL LAVINGIA: Thank you.

It was fun.

Thanks for having me on.