If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Matteo Wong on Signal at @matteowong.52.

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.

[Read: DOGE has ‘god mode’ access to government data]

The bot, which GSA leadership is framing as a productivity booster for federal workers, is part of a broader playbook from DOGE and its allies. Speaking about GSA’s broader plans, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who was recently installed as the director of the Technology Transformation Services (TTS), GSA’s IT division, said at an all-hands meeting last month that the agency is pushing for an “AI-first strategy.” In the meeting, a recording of which I obtained, Shedd said that “as we decrease [the] overall size of the federal government, as you all know, there’s still a ton of programs that need to exist, which is a huge opportunity for technology and automation to come in full force.” He suggested that “coding agents” could be provided across the government—a reference to AI programs that can write and possibly deploy code in place of a human. Moreover, Shedd said, AI could “run analysis on contracts,” and software could be used to “automate” GSA’s “finance functions.”

A small technology team within GSA called 10x started developing the program during President Joe Biden’s term, and initially envisioned it not as a productivity tool but as an AI testing ground: a place to experiment with AI models for federal uses, similar to how private companies create internal bespoke AI tools. But DOGE allies have pushed to accelerate the tool’s development and deploy it as a work chatbot amid mass layoffs (tens of thousands of federal workers have resigned or been terminated since Elon Musk began his assault on the government). The chatbot’s rollout was first noted by Wired, but further details about its wider launch and the software’s previous development had not been reported prior to this story.

The program—which was briefly called “GSAi” and is now known internally as “GSA Chat” or simply “chat”—was described as a tool to draft emails, write code, “and much more!” in an email sent by Zach Whitman, GSA’s chief AI officer, to some of the software’s early users. An internal guide for federal employees notes that the GSA chatbot “will help you work more effectively and efficiently.” The bot’s interface, which I have seen, looks and acts similar to that of ChatGPT or any similar program: Users type into a prompt box, and the program responds. GSA intends to eventually roll the AI out to other government agencies, potentially under the name “AI.gov.” The system currently allows users to select from models licensed from Meta and Anthropic, and although agency staff currently can’t upload documents to the chatbot, they likely will be permitted to in the future, according to a GSA employee with knowledge of the project and the chatbot’s code repository. The program could conceivably be used to plan large-scale government projects, inform reductions in force, or query centralized repositories of federal data, the GSA worker told me.

Spokespeople for DOGE did not respond to my requests for comment, and the White House press office directed me to GSA. In response to a detailed list of questions, Will Powell, the acting press secretary for GSA, wrote in an emailed statement that “GSA is currently undertaking a review of its available IT resources, to ensure our staff can perform their mission in support of American taxpayers,” and that the agency is “conducting comprehensive testing to verify the effectiveness and reliability of all tools available to our workforce.”

At this point, it’s common to use AI for work, and GSA’s chatbot may not have a dramatic effect on the government’s operations. But it is just one small example of a much larger effort as DOGE continues to decimate the civil service. At the Department of Education, DOGE advisers have reportedly fed sensitive data on agency spending into AI programs to identify places to cut. DOGE reportedly intends to use AI to help determine whether employees across the government should keep their job. In another TTS meeting late last week—a recording of which I reviewed—Shedd said he expects that the division will be “at least 50 percent smaller” within weeks. (TTS houses the team that built GSA Chat.) And arguably more controversial possibilities for AI loom on the horizon: For instance, the State Department plans to use the technology to help review the social-media posts of tens of thousands of student-visa holders so that the department may revoke visas held by students who appear to support designated terror groups, according to Axios.

Rushing into a generative-AI rollout carries well-established risks. AI models exhibit all manner of biases, struggle with factual accuracy, are expensive, and have opaque inner workings; a lot can and does go wrong even when more responsible approaches to the technology are taken. GSA seemed aware of this reality when it initially started work on its chatbot last summer. It was then that 10x, the small technology team within GSA, began developing what was known as the “10x AI Sandbox.” Far from a general-purpose chatbot, the sandbox was envisioned as a secure, cost-effective environment for federal employees to explore how AI might be able to assist their work, according to the program’s code base on GitHub—for instance, by testing prompts and designing custom models. “The principle behind this thing is to show you not that AI is great for everything, to try to encourage you to stick AI into every product you might be ideating around,” a 10x engineer said in an early demo video for the sandbox, “but rather to provide a simple way to interact with these tools and to quickly prototype.”

[Kara Swisher: Move fast and destroy democracy]

But Donald Trump appointees pushed to quickly release the software as a chat assistant, seemingly without much regard for which applications of the technology may be feasible. AI could be a useful assistant for federal employees in specific ways, as GSA’s chatbot has been framed, but given the technology’s propensity to make up legal precedents, it also very well could not. As a recently departed GSA employee told me, “They want to cull contract data into AI to analyze it for potential fraud, which is a great goal. And also, if we could do that, we’d be doing it already.” Using AI creates “a very high risk of flagging false positives,” the employee said, “and I don’t see anything being considered to serve as a check against that.” A help page for early users of the GSA chat tool notes concerns including “hallucination”—an industry term for AI confidently presenting false information as true—“biased responses or perpetuated stereotypes,” and “privacy issues,” and instructs employees not to enter personally identifiable information or sensitive unclassified information. How any of those warnings will be enforced was not specified.

Of course, federal agencies have been experimenting with generative AI for many months. Before the November election, for instance, GSA had initiated a contract with Google to test how AI models “can enhance productivity, collaboration, and efficiency,” according to a public inventory. The Departments of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Veterans Affairs, as well as numerous other federal agencies, were testing tools from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and elsewhere before the inauguration. Some kind of federal chatbot was probably inevitable.

But not necessarily in this form. Biden took a more cautious approach to the technology: In a landmark executive order and subsequent federal guidance, the previous administration stressed that the government’s use of AI should be subject to thorough testing, strict guardrails, and public transparency, given the technology’s obvious risks and shortcomings. Trump, on his first day in office, repealed that order, with the White House later saying that it had imposed “onerous and unnecessary government control.” Now DOGE and the Trump administration appear intent on using the entire federal government as a sandbox, and the more than 340 million Americans they serve as potential test subjects.

President Donald Trump’s shift on the Department of Government Efficiency began with a warning from an unlikely source.

Jesse Watters, a co-host of the Fox News hit show The Five, is usually a slick deliverer of MAGA talking points. But on February 19, Watters told a surprisingly emotional story about a friend working at the Pentagon who was poised to lose his job as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce. “I finally found one person I knew who got DOGE’d, and it hit me in the heart,” said Watters, who urged his Fox colleagues to “be a little bit less callous.”

Although Watters soon resumed championing DOGE, the moment went viral. Trump watched the clip and asked advisers if it was resonating with his base of supporters, according to one of three White House officials I spoke with for this story (they requested anonymity so they could discuss private conversations).

Over the ensuing weeks, the president grew unhappy with the television coverage of cuts affecting his voters, according to two of those officials, while the White House fielded calls from Cabinet members and Republican lawmakers frustrated by Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul empowered to slash the federal government. Some of Trump’s top advisers became worried about the political fallout from DOGE’s sweeping cuts, especially after seeing scenes of angry constituents yelling at GOP members of Congress in town halls.

[Read: Hungary joins the DOGE efforts]

All of this culminated in Trump taking his first steps to rein in Musk’s powers yesterday. The president called a closed-door meeting with Cabinet members and Musk, one that devolved into sharp exchanges between the DOGE head and several agency leaders. Afterward, Trump declared that his Cabinet would now “go first” in deciding whom in their departments to keep or fire.

DOGE lives. Trump has made clear that Musk still wields significant authority. And those close to Trump say that the president is still enamored with the idea of employing the world’s richest man, and still largely approves of the work that DOGE is doing to gut the federal bureaucracy. Some in the White House also believe that clarifying Musk’s purview might help the administration in a series of lawsuits alleging that Musk is illegally empowered.

But Trump’s first public effort to put a leash on Musk appears to mark the end of DOGE’s opening chapter, and a potential early turning point in Trump’s new administration.

Many in the GOP have reveled in the brash way that Musk and his young team of engineers have strode into government agencies, seized the computers, and slashed jobs and budgets. And few Republicans have been willing to publicly challenge Musk, who has taken on hero status with many on the right and wields an unfathomable fortune with which he can punish his political foes. But important figures within the president’s orbit—including some senior staffers and outside advisers—now quietly hope that the cuts, as Trump himself posted on social media yesterday, will be done with a “‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’”

“I don’t want to see a big cut where a lot of good people are cut,” Trump said to reporters in the Oval Office after yesterday’s meeting. But, he added, “Elon and the group are going to be watching them, and if they can cut, it’s better. And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”

Six weeks into Trump’s term, the White House has declined to say how many people have left the federal government so far, or how many more it wants to see fired as it looks to reshape the government’s civil service of 2.3 million workers. Democrats, shaking off their despondency after November’s elections, have rallied against Musk, trying to save agencies such as USAID and warning that all Americans, no matter their political party, would feel the impact of DOGE cuts to agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, the IRS, and the Department of Agriculture. Musk paid them no heed, trashing Democrats’ objections to his more than 219 million followers on X and wielding an actual chain saw onstage at a conservative conference last month. Days later, he directed that an email be sent to the entire federal workforce asking workers to justify their employment by listing their accomplishments of the past week.

That was the breaking point for several Cabinet members. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and FBI Director Kash Patel were among the officials who voiced complaints to their staff and to the White House that Musk was usurping their authority, one of the White House officials told me. Their agencies, along with many others, instructed employees not to reply to Musk’s email, and the government’s main personnel agency later said that responding was voluntary, neutering DOGE’s threats. Trump’s Cabinet officials broadly agree with DOGE’s mission—to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse in government—but object to the seemingly haphazard way it is being executed.

[Juliette Kayyem: Is DOGE sure it wants to fire these people?]

That pushback from inside the administration was combined with rising public anger about the cuts that exploded at several lawmakers’ town halls in recent weeks. From Georgia to Kansas, Republicans took sharp criticism about the cuts, including from some in the crowds who described themselves as Trump voters and veterans. The National Republican Congressional Committee told lawmakers this week to postpone holding any further town halls. The anger reverberated to Capitol Hill this week, with several Republicans privately urging DOGE to slow down.

Majority Leader John Thune said on CNN on Tuesday that Cabinet secretaries should retain the full power to hire and fire, a belief he later reiterated privately to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, according to one of the White House officials who was briefed on the call. This person told me that in recent weeks, Wiles has also relayed to Trump other GOP lawmakers’ concerns about Musk, including that the constant drip of stories about DOGE slashing key jobs is distracting from their political messaging on issues such as immigration and taxes.

Musk was invited to a Senate lunch on Wednesday, a meal that took place just hours after the Supreme Court delivered a significant blow to the Trump administration in one of several ongoing legal fights over spending cuts. In the meeting, lawmakers later told reporters, several senators urged Musk to better coordinate with Congress by giving them more visibility into his process. They also offered to make the cuts permanent by enshrining them in legislation.

Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters afterward that the “the system needs to be fine-tuned to coordinate between DOGE and Congress and the administration,” and that Musk needs to be better about addressing senators’ concerns. Musk, in the lunch, distanced himself from some of the more unpopular firings. Hours later, he had a similar meeting with House Republicans, some of whom voiced unhappiness with that day’s news reports about plans to fire 80,000 Veterans Affairs workers, thousands of whom are veterans themselves, in a move that would likely delay vital services to those who have served the country in uniform.

Trump also grew angry at those reports, snapping at aides that he did not want to be seen as someone who betrayed veterans, many of whom he believes voted for him, an outside adviser who spoke with the president told me. That, when combined with the complaints from his advisers and worries that Musk was beginning to drag down his own poll numbers, prompted him to call for the meeting with the DOGE leader and the Cabinet heads at the White House yesterday.

The meeting soon grew volatile, according to an official present, with Rubio snapping back at Musk when the billionaire accused him of not moving fast enough with his firings. Musk and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also clashed over the quality of air-traffic controllers, while Doug Collins, who runs the Department of Veterans Affairs, urged that any layoffs be done more carefully. Trump agreed. Details of the meeting were first reported today by The New York Times. In addition to announcing that the Cabinet secretaries would be in charge of firings, Trump said that similar meetings would be held every two weeks.

“Everyone is working as one team to help President Trump deliver on his promise to make our government more efficient,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told me in a statement when I asked if Musk’s role is shrinking.

Tammy Bruce, a spokesperson for the State Department, said in a statement: “Secretary Rubio considered the meeting an open and productive discussion with a dynamic team that is united in achieving the same goal: making America great again.” The Departments of Defense and Transportation, the FBI, and the VA, as well as DOGE, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Musk later wrote on X that the meeting was “very productive.” Yet for some in MAGA’s populist wing, the moment was perceived as a humiliation for the billionaire. They rallied around efforts to protect the Pentagon and the authority of Hegseth, a popular figure on the right. A cartoon of Trump walking Musk like a dog on a leash was passed around on the Hill and in right-wing-media circles. Some predicted that Trump would soon jettison his billionaire completely.

[Read: The Trump voters who are losing patience]

The White House insists that Musk’s work will continue. The Office of Personnel Management outlined plans this week for a new wave of firings, offering guidance to cut entire teams and job categories. Most of those fired so far have been probationary employees, who are typically new hires with fewer job protections.

Democrats, who see Musk as a potent political target for their party, have downplayed the significance of Musk’s seeming demotion.

“I don’t think anything has fundamentally changed.” Representative Adam Smith, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, told me. “It’s not about government efficiency and effectiveness. It’s about crippling the federal workforce because he sees it as a threat to him instead of a service provider to the country.”

In an effort to ward off other court challenges, the administration has also tried to stress that Musk, who is a special government employee, is not technically running the U.S. DOGE Service; instead, the White House said last month, DOGE is administered by Amy Gleason, a former health-care executive who worked for the agency in a previous iteration.

The claim was undermined, however, by Trump’s own words: When he spoke before Congress on Tuesday night, he repeatedly referred to Musk as the head of DOGE.

At Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, late last month, Elon Musk sheepishly admitted that DOGE had “accidentally canceled very briefly” Ebola-prevention programs. After a nervous chuckle, he claimed that the oversight had been swiftly corrected. But it wasn’t. The truth is far more disturbing—this administration didn’t just pause a line item; it has actively dismantled the infrastructure the country relies on to detect and confront deadly pathogens.

For more than a decade, I have worked as a physician and public-health expert responding to infectious diseases around the world. In 2014, while treating Ebola patients in Guinea, I contracted and survived Ebola myself. I know how lethal Donald Trump’s assault on America’s outbreak preparedness could be. We are sure to regret it.

DOGE’s slash-and-burn campaign has hit everything from the NIH to the National Weather Service. The cuts to global health, however, are especially alarming. It’s unclear what Musk thought would happen when he fed the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper,” as he proclaimed with gleeful indifference on X, the social-media megaphone he owns. Ditto what Trump thought when he withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization and effectively muzzled the CDC. But the result has been that, in little more than a month, America has transformed itself from a preeminent global-health leader into an untrustworthy has-been. Undermining even one of these institutions would have posed a serious threat; gutting them all at once is an invitation for future outbreaks.

The fallout from these sweeping cuts is particularly evident when examining USAID, or what’s left of it. The agency’s tagline was “From the American people,” and perhaps the American people didn’t understand that it was also for them. Musk disparaged the agency outright—declaring it a “criminal organization.” The White House pointed to alleged wasteful spending, including funding for a “DEI musical” in Ireland (which wasn’t even funded by USAID, it turned out). In decrying the agency’s downfall, many Democrats focused more on the importance of “soft power” foreign policy than on-the-ground impact. Yet much of USAID’s budget was devoted to addressing humanitarian and health crises abroad with the implicit goal of preventing these emergencies from reaching our own shores. (Explicitly, the goal was to “advance American security and prosperity.”) Americans are safer when instability and infectious threats are effectively managed on foreign lands.

[Donald Moynihan: The DOGE project will backfire]

USAID was also the primary funder of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, established in 2003 under George W. Bush. PEPFAR has saved more than 25 million lives and helped smother the global HIV pandemic. More than 20 million people—500,000 of them children—were receiving HIV treatment through the program when Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office pausing all foreign aid for 90 days. Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised that waivers would allow the life-saving work to continue, but few have materialized. Meanwhile, USAID staff who were placed on administrative leave can’t distribute medicines or cover costs for transport and personnel. After this dismantling, PEPFAR’s activities in hundreds of places around the world remain restricted at best, and fully paused at worst. Without the support long provided by the program, thousands of people will likely die far younger than they would have with proper medical care. PEPFAR’s current authorization ends later this month; its future after that is unclear.

Similarly, USAID’s efforts to stop Ebola at its source are also now gone. USAID’s role in Ebola containment has long been essential. During the 2014 West Africa outbreak—during which more than 11,000 people died—USAID oversaw training of local health-care workers, the building of Ebola treatment centers, and passenger screening at the borders and airports. A decade later and just days into Trump’s second term, Uganda reported another Ebola outbreak. This time, though, the foreign-aid freeze Trump had put in place meant that USAID was unable to supply the usual resources for transporting lab specimens or implementing airport screening. The day after Musk reassured the Cabinet that Ebola prevention had been swiftly restored, the State Department canceled crucial contact tracing and surveillance efforts for Uganda’s outbreak. With USAID nowhere to be found, the WHO scaled up its own response. That’s something, for now, but America’s absence is shameful.

Moreover, the WHO may not have the capacity to do so for much longer. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order moving to withdraw from the WHO, accusing it of demanding “onerous payments from the United States.” In 2023, the U.S. contributed $481 million—an eighth of what Americans spend on professional dog-training services every year—to WHO’s operating budget. Admittedly, many Americans—fueled by Trump’s denigration of the organization—developed a deep distrust of the WHO following perceived missteps during the coronavirus pandemic. Even its supporters can see the organization’s flaws—it’s bureaucratic, sclerotic, and overdue for reform. Despite these shortcomings, it is an organization we desperately need, and no real alternative exists.

WHO is the only international organization that can identify and respond to emerging threats early on, such as flare-ups of unidentified outbreaks like the one currently circulating in northwestern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its global network of laboratories to detect infectious threats—known as the Gremlin—relies heavily on U.S. support and is now at risk of closure. And even as its partnerships alongside U.S. colleagues have strengthened surveillance, containment, and readiness abroad, the WHO also helps us here at home. On the same day as Musk’s Ebola comments, the FDA canceled the meeting where experts decide next season’s flu-vaccine composition. Going forward, the U.S. will have to wait on WHO guidance for that crucial decision and download the recipe for next year’s flu shot. If America keeps abdicating its leadership, it will be forced to rely on an organization whose funding it is slashing and whose collaboration it is severing. Although the WHO might still scrape together funds and staff, that’s not guaranteed—especially if other nations follow Trump’s example and cut ties or funding.

[Katherine J. Wu: Inside the collapse at the NIH]

With USAID and WHO under siege, more responsibility for global disease detection and response would fall on the CDC. But the future of the world’s preeminent “disease detectives” is at risk as well. The plan to slash the next cohort of CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officers—think Kate Winslet’s character in Contagion—was thankfully stopped at the 11th hour, but about 750 CDC staff were still let go in recent cuts, including many stationed on outbreak front lines across the country and around the globe (about 180 of those terminated were later reinstated). Certain pages on the CDC website were deleted, and when a judge ordered them restored, many had been dramatically altered. CDC communications such as the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report—which providers rely on to track health threats—were abruptly paused for the first time in more than 60 years. CDC staff were also ordered to stop communicating with, and to take their names off any scientific papers written with, anyone from the WHO, further weakening the CDC’s reach and insight into what’s happening around the world. Whether the issue is cuts to USAID, defunding the WHO, or hobbling the CDC, the end result is the same: America is walking away from global health leadership, making the entire world less safe—including us.

Understand how this will work at a practical level: Until recently, countries had compelling reasons to report outbreaks, even if such transparency sometimes came with travel bans or other stigmatizing restrictions. Those sticks were often worth the carrots, namely USAID funding and CDC expertise that would appear and help quickly end outbreaks. Now, with no carrots on offer, why would any country submit to the stick? Future outbreaks may be reported too late or not at all—leaving America oblivious to emerging health crises. Since 2014, seven public-health emergencies of international concern (PHEICs) have been declared by the WHO. The number of Ebola outbreaks is escalating, and climate change will intensify the emergence and spread of known and potentially unknown microbes.

It is in America’s interest to reverse course immediately and rebuild the crucial infrastructure needed to detect and respond to outbreaks. Not only is this the right thing to do, but it also makes economic sense. In 1980, at the height of the Cold War, the WHO declared smallpox eradicated—a milestone achieved through joint U.S. and Soviet support. Americans invested about $30 million to stamp out smallpox, a fraction of what the country now saves every year by no longer needing to vaccinate against or treat smallpox—to say nothing of the lives saved.

Americans believe that about 25 percent of the country’s budget is spent on foreign aid. In reality, the figure is 1 percent, or at least it was. USAID’s entire 2023 spending was $43 billion—a 20th of the U.S. defense budget and about what Musk’s enterprises have received in government funding. The CDC’s was even less, just $9 billion.

[Nicholas Florko: Spared by DOGE—for now]

Despite his actions, Musk clearly understands that these systems are essential for America’s security. After admitting his Ebola error, he quickly clarified: “I think we all want Ebola prevention.” That would require pulling USAID’s most essential remnants out of the dustbin. The U.S. must also reengage with the WHO and negotiate the terms of its renewed support and engagement with the organization before it’s too late. And for all the distrust many Americans harbor toward the CDC post-pandemic, they must rally around it—an agency whose role will become only more indispensable as measles, bird flu, and other pathogens spread across the country.

Now, and with startling speed, the country is turning its back on global health. In doing so, it is endangering other nations, and also itself. USAID’s account on X, once a digital chronicle of its achievements, is gone. When I search for it on my phone, I get an error message: “Something went wrong. Try again.” We must heed that warning. Musk and Trump have destroyed the shield that once protected America from the next global contagion. Deadly diseases don’t bother with borders; no wall will keep them out. If America stays the course, “Something went wrong” will become the epitaph of a great country, one that once led the world in global health preparedness. It will be deeply missed.