Investigation launched into Trump admin use of artificial intelligence on workers

03 March

Donald Trump gestures at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S., December 22, 2024. REUTERS/Cheney Orr

A watchdog organization on Monday launched a public records probe to determine the extent to which the Trump administration and its billionaire wrecking ball, Elon Musk, are using artificial intelligence as part of their lawless effort to purge the federal workforce.

"The American people deserve to know what is going on—including if and how artificial intelligence is being used to reshape the departments and agencies people rely on daily," said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, the group behind the new investigation.

"We will continue to use every tool at our disposal to force the Trump-Vance administration to fulfill its obligation to the public and to our system of laws," Perryman added.

The probe comes days after NBC Newsreported that federal workers' responses to Musk's email ultimatum were "expected to be fed into an artificial intelligence system to determine whether those jobs are necessary."

"The information will go into an LLM (Large Language Model), an advanced AI system that looks at huge amounts of text data to understand, generate and process human language," the news outlet reported, citing unnamed sources. "The AI system will determine whether someone's work is mission-critical or not."

Additionally, according to The Washington Post, Musk lieutenants "have fed sensitive data from across the Education Department into artificial intelligence software."

Democracy Forward said Monday that it would use Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in an attempt to shine light on the administration's reliance on AI for personnel decisions. The Trump Justice Department argued in a court filing last week that the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is exempt from public records requests—a claim that experts have rejected and condemned as an attempt to skirt oversight.

"For an administration that claimed it wanted to bring about transparency and efficiency in government, the Trump-Vance administration's purge of public servants and sloppy processes have done just the opposite," Perryman said Monday. "DOGE and this administration are operating in a shroud of secrecy, and their 'govern by chaos' tactics have only made government less efficient and caused disruptions to our safety and security."

Democracy Forward said its new FOIA requests were sent to DOGE as well as the Office of Personnel Management, the State Department, the Education Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the General Services Administration, among other agencies.

Wired reported last month that "Thomas Shedd, the recently appointed Technology Transformation Services director and Elon Musk ally, told General Services Administration workers that the agency's new administrator is pursuing an 'AI-first strategy.'"

"Shedd provided a handful of examples of projects GSA Acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian is looking to prioritize, including the development of 'AI coding agents' that would be made available for all agencies," Wired added. "Shedd made it clear that he believes much of the work at [Technology Transformation Services] and the broader government, particularly around finance tasks, could be automated.

Geoffrey Fowler, the Post's technology columnist, noted Monday that "lots of recent evidence shows that relying on automation alone to make critical decisions can lead to big government mistakes."

"Just ask New York City, where last year a government AI chatbot advised businesses to break the law," Fowler wrote. "Or Australia, where a deeply flawed algorithm called Robodebt created the opposite of efficiency: the government had to settle for more than a billion dollars with citizens for wrongly reclaiming benefits."

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