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Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency appear to have wide-reaching plans to remake the government with AI. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who is now the head of the Technology Transformation Services, a federal IT division, invoked an “AI-first strategy” at a recent staff meeting.
There’s nothing wrong with using AI to streamline and improve federal services per se. The technology could be implemented democratically, with transparent guardrails and in service of constituents. But using AI to sweep away and replace swaths of civil servants, Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders argued in a story for The Atlantic this week, is a very different matter. “If human workers are widely replaced with AI,” they wrote, “executives will have unilateral authority to instantaneously alter the behavior of the government, profoundly raising the stakes for transitions of power in democracy.”
The civil service, which translates federal policies into actions, consists of an enormous number of public servants and thus can be slow to change. That might be frustrating, but it also prevents executives from rapidly, unilaterally transforming the workings of the government. Unlike an army of human bureaucrats, an army of AI agents could, almost on a whim, be redirected—upending social-welfare programs, altering law-enforcement directives, sidestepping Congress. Donald Trump’s “unprecedented purge of the civil service might be the last time a president needs to replace the human beings in government in order to dictate its new functions,” Schneier and Sanders wrote. “Future leaders may do so at the press of a button.”
It’s Time to Worry About DOGE’s AI Plans
By Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders
Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s chaotic approach to reform is upending government operations. Critical functions have been halted, tens of thousands of federal staffers are being encouraged to resign, and congressional mandates are being disregarded. The next phase: The Department of Government Efficiency reportedly wants to use AI to cut costs. According to The Washington Post, Musk’s group has started to run sensitive data from government systems through AI programs to analyze spending and determine what could be pruned. This may lead to the elimination of human jobs in favor of automation. As one government official who has been tracking Musk’s DOGE team told the Post, the ultimate aim is to use AI to replace “the human workforce with machines.” (Spokespeople for the White House and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.)
Using AI to make government more efficient is a worthy pursuit, and this is not a new idea. The Biden administration disclosed more than 2,000 AI applications in development across the federal government. For example, FEMA has started using AI to help perform damage assessment in disaster areas. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has started using AI to look for fraudulent billing. The idea of replacing dedicated and principled civil servants with AI agents, however, is new—and complicated.
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The Trump administration’s other major plan for AI is far less futuristic. The president and the oil-and-gas industry—which donated tens of millions to his reelection campaign—say fossil fuels may power the way to America’s AI dominance.
The chatbot boom, to hear tech executives tell it, will require unprecedented amounts of power, of which there currently isn’t enough. Soon, America just won’t have enough electricity, pushing the country further into the “energy emergency” Trump declared on his first day in office—and presenting an opportunity to build out natural-gas plants to power the data centers that AI relies on. Already, several major utilities are planning major fossil-fuel build-outs to meet growing demand from the technology. “The problem, though, is that the U.S. is not actually in an energy crunch,” I wrote in an article earlier this week. Rather than requiring more fossil fuels, AI seems to offer a pretense for expanding their production.
P.S.
Elon Musk appears on top of the world, or at least the U.S., at the moment. But his influence rests largely on the success of Tesla—and the car company is in an ever more precarious position, with Musk himself to blame, Patrick George writes.
— Matteo
The post The Real Problem With DOGE’s AI Plans appeared first on The Atlantic.
