The AI Era of Governing Has Arrived
DOGE and its allies are forcing the civil service into a chaotic future.
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President Donald Trump’s administration is embracing AI. According to reports, agencies are using the technology to identify places to cut costs, figure out which employees can be terminated, and comb through social-media posts to determine whether student-visa holders may support terror groups. And as my colleague Matteo Wong reported this week, employees at the General Services Administration are being urged to use a new chatbot to do their work, while simultaneously hearing from officials that their jobs are far from secure; Thomas Shedd, the director of the GSA division that produced the AI, told workers that the department will soon be “at least 50 percent smaller.”
This is a haphazard leap into a future that tech giants have been pushing us toward for years. Work is being automated, people are losing their jobs, and it’s not at all clear that any of this will make the government more efficient, as Elon Musk and DOGE have promised.
DOGE’s Plans to Replace Humans With AI Are Already Under Way
By Matteo Wong
A new phase of the president and the Department of Government Efficiency’s attempts to downsize and remake the civil service is under way. The idea is simple: use generative AI to automate work that was previously done by people.
The Trump administration is testing a new chatbot with 1,500 federal employees at the General Services Administration and may release it to the entire agency as soon as this Friday—meaning it could be used by more than 10,000 workers who are responsible for more than $100 billion in contracts and services. This article is based in part on conversations with several current and former GSA employees with knowledge of the technology, all of whom requested anonymity to speak about confidential information; it is also based on internal GSA documents that I reviewed, as well as the software’s code base, which is visible on GitHub.
What to Read Next
- Elon Musk looks desperate: “Musk has wagered the only thing he can’t easily buy back—the very myth he created for himself,” Charlie Warzel writes.
- Move fast and destroy democracy: “Silicon Valley’s titans have decided that ruling the digital world is not enough,” Kara Swisher writes.
P.S.
The internet can still be good. In a story for The Atlantic’s April issue, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance explores how Reddit became arguably “the best platform on a junky web.” Reading it in between editing stories about AI, I was struck by how much of what Adrienne described was fundamentally human: “There is a subreddit where violinists gently correct one another’s bow holds, a subreddit for rowers where people compare erg scores, and a subreddit for people who are honest-to-God allergic to the cold and trade tips about which antihistamine regimen works best,” she writes. “One subreddit is for people who encounter cookie cutters whose shapes they cannot decipher. The responses reliably entail a mix of sincere sleuthing to find the answer and ridiculously creative and crude joke guesses.” How wholesome!
— Damon
