Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is working on an artificial intelligence tool that can automate its sweeping (sometimes mistaken) cuts to the federal work force, Wired reported Tuesday.
Engineers at DOGE have been working on AutoRIF, a program developed by the Department of Defense. Its name stands for Automated Reduction in Force, and it has the capability to automatically generate lists of government employees, ranking them in order of how subject they are to being fired—a task traditionally done by human resources—a former government H.R. employee told Wired.
“However, even with the use of any automated system, the OPM guidance says all data has to be confirmed manually and that employees (or their representative) are allowed to examine the registers,” the employee added.
DOGE employees appeared to have accessed AutoRIF’s code in the Office of Personnel Management’s system, and have begun editing its code. The screenshots indicate that one DOGE employee, Riccardo Biasini, a former engineer at Tesla, has been shearing the code.
Federal government employees are bracing themselves for a second round of sweeping, government-wide layoffs. The first round of layoffs earlier this month targeted probationary employees, who have worked for the government for less than a year and lack the same protections as their colleagues.
So far, the sweeping layoffs that have helped contribute to the whopping 95,000 eliminated government jobs have all been determined by human beings who combed through government databases looking for employees to prune.
But DOGE’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce have already led to significant issues, as essential workers are mistakenly dismissed and government agencies are sent scrambling to hire them back.
Earlier this month, the Department of Agriculture needed to rescind the terminations of “several” agency employees who were actively working to address the ongoing bird flu outbreak. A whopping 300 employees who oversee America’s nuclear stockpile were fired from the National Nuclear Security Administration and then quickly invited to return to their highly essential jobs. In another close call, approximately 950 employees at the Indian Health Service were informed that they would receive termination notices, but their jobs were miraculously saved by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the last minute.
It’s not clear that employing an AI model would help to mitigate these mistakes, only make the pruning of federal employees that much more inhuman.
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