Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been clear about its plans to fire tens of thousands of employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs. New WIRED reporting sheds light on the specific DOGE operatives at the VA and the ways they’re trying to infiltrate and drastically change the agency.
On March 25, tech staffers and contractors at the VA noticed an unfamiliar name trying to push changes that could impact VA.gov code. It was Sahil Lavingia, a newcomer to the agency listed in the VA’s internal directory as an adviser to the chief of staff, Christopher Syrek.
Lavingia's presence in the VA's GitHub instance—a publicly viewable platform that houses projects and code for VA.gov—set off immediate alarm bells. It bore all the hallmarks of DOGE’s incursion into the federal government: Lavingia, a startup CEO and engineer with no government experience, all of a sudden had power—and was in their systems.
Since then, VA employees say they have had multiple concerns following interactions with Lavingia. Beyond his GitHub access, sources who spoke to WIRED indicate that Lavingia, who said on Slack that he wanted to digitize the agency, also appears to be trying to use an AI tool called OpenHands to write code for the VA’s systems. One person with knowledge says that Lavingia had been given what’s known as a “zero account,” which would allow him to be granted privileged access to VA systems.
In response to WIRED’s questions about his work at the VA, Lavingia responded by email saying, “Sorry, I'm not going to answer these, besides to say I'm unpaid. And a fan of your work!”
Lavingia is not the only DOGE representative at the VA. According to sources within the agency, the DOGE delegation also includes Cary Volpert and Christopher Roussos. Other known DOGE members at the VA include Justin Fulcher, who ran a telehealth startup that went bankrupt in the late 2010s, and Payton Rehling and Jon Koval, both of whom worked for Valor Equity Partners and appeared at the Social Security Administration along with the fund’s founder and Musk ally, Antonio Gracias.
These DOGE operatives appear to have no work experience that’s remotely close to the VA in terms of its scale or complexity. The VA administers all the government benefits afforded to veterans and their families for roughly 10 million people, including education, loans, disability payments, and health care. Lavingia is the CEO of Gumroad, a platform that helps creatives sell their work and takes a cut of each sale. More recently, according to his blog, Lavingia launched Flexile, a tool to manage and pay contractors. According to his LinkedIn profile, Lavingia was the second employee at Pinterest, which he left in 2011 to found Gumroad. Lavingia is also an angel investor in other startups via SHL Capital, which backed Clubhouse and Lambda School, among others.
Volpert, who is listed as a senior adviser to the chief of staff, is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. On a third-party job site Volpert is listed as the founder of a startup called Lindy Live, which once offered social engagement for senior citizens. According to documents viewed by WIRED, Volpert has been reviewing VA contracts with what appears to be the intent of canceling those agreements. Roussos is the former CEO of 24 Hour Fitness and most recently was CEO of AllerVie Health, an allergy and immunology startup, according to his LinkedIn profile. Last February, he became chair of the company’s board of directors. He is also listed as an adviser to the chief of staff at the VA. Volpert, Roussos, and Lavingia, according to a source at the VA, were introduced by agency leadership in meetings as DOGE representatives.
“DOGE's actions at the VA are putting veterans' lives at risk,” representative Gerald Connolly, ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, tells WIRED. Veterans, he adds, risk being “stripped of the care they need and deserve because [President Donald] Trump and Elon have turned the VA over to lackeys who do not know the first thing about what it means to serve your country."
VA employees have expressed concern about the changes the DOGE staffers have already started to make to the agency. “These people have zero clue what they are working on,” a VA employee tells WIRED.
The VA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did Volpert, Roussos, Fulcher, Rehling, or Koval.
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Lavingia’s past work, however, appears to have informed his present outlook at the VA, especially when it comes to AI. In a blog post on his personal website from October 2024, Lavingia discussed how Gumroad, which laid off most of its employees in 2015, had achieved financial stability: “replacing every manual process with an automated one, by pushing all marginal costs to the customer, and having almost no employees.”
“Today, humans are necessary for stellar customer service, crisis management, regulatory compliance and negotiations, property inspections, and more,” he wrote. “But it won't be long until AI can do all of the above.”
Two sources familiar with Lavingia’s work at the VA note that he appears to be trying to introduce an AI tool called OpenHands to write code for the agency. In GitHub, Lavingia requested to add OpenHands to the repertoire of programs that can be used by VA tech workers, and noted in Slack that this was “a priority for the [chief of staff] and Secretary.” (OpenHands is available for anyone to download on GitHub.)
“They’ve asked us to consider using AI for all development contracts and have us justify why it can’t do it,” says the VA employee. “I think they are considering how to fill the gaps [of canceled contracts] with AI.”
“We don’t really have approval to use AI, because there is sensitive info in some of the GitHub repos,” says a second VA tech worker who, like other sources, asked to remain anonymous because they’re not authorized to talk to the media. “Theoretically it could script something and pull out a bunch of data.” Much of that data, according to the source, is stored and accessed through several application programming interfaces. This includes information like the social security numbers of veterans and their family members and bank information, as well as medical and disability history.
New tools also mean new security risks. “Any programming tools or applications that you use in federal systems have to meet a bunch of security classifications,” the source says. They worry that the proposed use of OpenHands has not been properly vetted for government purposes for security gaps that could possibly leave the VA’s systems and data vulnerable.
“They’re not following any of the normal procedures, and it’s putting people at risk,” they say, noting that a system failure could impede veterans’ ability to access their benefits. “These are people who have given pieces of themselves to their country and they deserve more respect than that.”
A former VA employee who worked in the office of the CTO and asked for anonymity in order to protect their privacy says that OpenHands was not, as far as they knew, a tool approved for use at the agency. When asked to evaluate it based on the security assessment used at the agency, the person says that the tool’s ability to “modify code, run commands, browse the web, call APIs,” according to its website, was particularly concerning.
“That alarms me. That gives me Skynet vibes," they say. “I don’t necessarily want a computer to have all those capabilities unsupervised.”
OpenHands did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The source also says that AI-generated code can pose significant risks in general. “I would not want a tool like this writing code on VA.gov, because I think it would lead to a higher likelihood of bugs and therefore security issues being introduced into the platform,” they say, adding that “buggy code” could be easier to hack, introducing more security vulnerabilities. It could also accidentally access or modify the wrong data, including sensitive data. And even if the AI-generated code works well, it can be “unmaintainable,” because it is so complicated that even the people generating the code may not fully understand it and therefore not be able to update or change it when needed.
Lavingia has quickly suggested other changes at the VA as well.
Sources say Lavingia asked if there is a way to use veterans’ social security numbers or “other identifying information” to pre-fill customer forms with data from the VA system without the user being logged in. That data, according to one VA source, could include everything from their disability benefits and medical records and history. This kind of pre-filling requires users to be authenticated within the VA’s system, which not all of them are. A VA employee pushed back, noting that “there are fraud and risk concerns about someone submitting a form on behalf of a veteran when they have not been established as their caretaker.” Another employee noted this change would make it easier to “submit fraudulent forms at scale.”
In a March 26 Slack message, Lavingia also suggested that the agency should do away with paper forms entirely, aiming for “full digitization.”
“There are over 400 vet-facing forms that the VA supports, and only about 10 percent of those are digitized,” says a VA worker, noting that digitizing forms “can take years because of the sensitivity of the data” they contain. Additionally, many veterans are elderly and prefer using paper forms because they lack the technical skills to navigate digital platforms.
“Many vets don’t have computers or can’t see at all,” they say. “My skin is crawling thinking about the nonchalantness of this guy.”
Lavingia’s earliest activity on the VA’s Github is indicative of the broader tensions at the agency. According to GitHub pull requests and people familiar with his work, Lavingia sought to change the text in the website’s footer where the agency lists its social media presence from “Twitter” to “X.” (Musk renamed Twitter to X after purchasing it in 2022.)
That change was not as simple as it sounds.
“We wanted it to say ‘X (formerly Twitter)’ or something similar,” says the second VA tech worker. This was because the letter X is, on its own, not big enough to be compliant with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which requires federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. The single letter would be too difficult for someone to tap. Other VA workers suggested that they could use “X.com,” again in an attempt to make text more readable and accessible to disabled users.
“X.com is not an acceptable replacement. It must be ‘X’ to be consistent with the other sites where we use the names they prefer,” Lavingia responded. The VA website now simply lists “X.”
In a GitHub ticket viewed by WIRED, Lavingia also suggested abandoning Drupal, a content management system (CMS) that the VA uses for publishing updates and information about the agency and the services it provides on VA facility websites. “I think we should consider removing Drupal as part of our workflow, and all content should just live in the codebase,” he wrote.
Sources say that the regular office administrators and health workers staffed at VA locations around the country are often the ones responsible for making sure that the content about their facilities are clear and up to date on their VA webpages. Instead of being able to log in to the CMS and update the appropriate text or pages, Lavingia’s suggestion would mean they’d need to go into the actual code of the website to make simple changes. Any mistakes could break the sites, and one source worried that such a technical task would be too big of an ask for nontechnical VA staffers.
“There are over 1,000 VA editors that work in the hospitals as administrators and other roles that update the websites for each VA medical center and hospital every day. They are not engineers, they barely can use a CMS at all,” says the second VA worker, who was shocked by Lavingia’s suggestion. “This guy is suggesting we move all 55,000-plus pages of live content into the code.”
A week after Lavingia made this suggestion, the VA did not renew a contract for the workers who managed its CMS. This means, sources claim, that the VA’s facility locator, which lets users find a hospital or VA office near them, may stop functioning. This feature was managed through the contractor. (The DOGE account on X posted proudly, “VA was previously paying ~$380,000/month for minor website modifications. That contract has not been renewed and the same work is now being executed by 1 internal VA software engineer spending ~10 hours/week.” VA workers say they have no idea who the post refers to.)
Sources say that Lavingia’s casual approach extends even to such issues as meeting protocols. On Tuesday, during a Microsoft Teams call with Chris Johnston, the agency’s deputy chief technology officer, VA tech workers were surprised when they saw that someone had started recording in the middle of a call.
“It created a stir,” says a third VA worker who was in the meeting.
In a chatbox, Lavingia wrote, “Why can’t we record? I think we should unless there’s a legal reason not to,” noting that it would be helpful for people who couldn’t attend. Another person wrote back, informing Lavingia that the deck for the meeting would be shared in a Slack channel, “for reference.”
“I think it’s good policy to assume all meetings will be recorded,” Lavingia responded. The source who was on the call says that recording all calls is not the norm at the agency and that it is standard practice to ask to record calls before doing so.
“I see more naivete than evil,” says the VA worker who was at the meeting. “If you come up in Silicon Valley, you really do start to believe that because you launched some startup and were successful you have some kind of secret sauce. And everything outside of your founder/startup ecosystem needs to be disrupted.”
But the worker says that Lavingia’s backing by Musk and DOGE has created a culture of fear. “Everyone is scared to death of him and takes every question or suggestion as an edict,” they say.
According to his GitHub account, it appears that while he is at the VA, Lavingia is continuing to work on his tool Flexile, which now also bears the name “Antiwork.” GitHub records show he has been working on the code even up to this week. The VA did not respond to questions about whether this is permissible while working with the agency. (Government workers are allowed to take on some kinds of outside work, generally with agency permission, so long as it doesn’t conflict with their existing role.)
Makena Kelly contributed reporting.
