The Trump administration has told migrants to leave voluntarily or face harsher consequences.

New Prime Minister of Canada vows to win trade war against President Trump.

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.

The decision is part of a broader crackdown on immigration that critics say violates asylum rights under US law.

Donald Trump’s approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has always been to root for Russia while pretending he isn’t. Trump just hates killing and death. More than that, he hates sending American money overseas. The claim that he actually agrees with Moscow is a hoax, remember. Trump is all about putting America first. Or so he’s said, and so his mostly non-Russophilic supporters claim to believe.

But now he has flung the mask to the ground. The president’s latest positions on the war reveal that he is indifferent to ongoing slaughter—indeed, he is willing to increase it—and that his opposition to Ukraine’s independence has nothing to do with saving American tax dollars. Trump simply wants Russia to win.

[Jonathan Chait: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

In recent days, Trump has said he is “looking at” a plan to revoke the temporary legal status of Ukrainians who fled to the United States. After Ukraine expressed willingness to sign away a large share of the proceeds from its natural-resource sales (in return for nothing), Trump said that might not be enough to restore support. Trump is now pushing Ukraine’s president to step down and hold elections, according to NBC. Volodymyr Zelensky’s domestic approval rating sits at 67 percent, and his most viable opponents have said that they oppose elections at the present time. The notion that Trump actually cares about democracy, and would downgrade his relations with a foreign country over its failure to meet his high governance standards, is so laughable that even a Trump loyalist like Sean Hannity would have trouble saying it with a straight face.

Trump exposed his preferences most clearly in his decision to cut off the supply of intelligence to Ukraine. The effect of this sudden reversal—which does not save the American taxpayer any money—was immediate and dramatic. Russian air attacks, now enjoying the element of surprise, pounded newly exposed Ukrainian civilian targets, leaving scenes of death and destruction.

The grim spectacle of watching the death toll spike, without any appreciable benefit to American interests, ought to have had a sobering effect on the president. At least it would have if his ostensible objectives were his actual ones. Instead, he seemed visibly pleased.

Paying close attention to his rhetoric reveals the significance of the turn. Speaking to reporters from his desk in the Oval Office, Trump, asked whether the bombing campaign changes his oft-expressed view that Vladimir Putin desires peace, affirmed that it does not. “I believe him,” he said. “I think we’re doing very well with Russia. But right now they’re bombing the hell out of Ukraine, and Ukraine—I’m finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine. And they don’t have the cards.” It was Trump himself, of course, who had taken “cards” away from Ukraine by suddenly exposing its cities to bombardment.

A reporter asked if Putin was “taking advantage” of Trump’s move. Trump made clear that the Russian president was doing precisely what he had expected. “I think he’s doing what anybody else would do,” he said. “I think he wants to get it stopped and settled, and I think he’s hitting ’em harder than he’s been hitting ’em, and I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now. He wants to get it ended, and I think Ukraine wants to get it ended, but I don’t see—it’s crazy, they’re taking tremendous punishment. I don’t quite get it.”

[Olga Khazan: Putin is loving this]

Why not, a reporter asked, provide air defenses? “Because I have to know that they want to settle,” Trump replied. “I don’t know that they want to settle. If they don’t want to settle, we’re out of there, because we want them to settle, and I’m doing it to stop death.”

Trump’s rhetoric signals an important evolution in his policy. He is no longer arguing for peace at any price. Instead, he has identified a good guy (Russia) and a bad guy (Ukraine). The good guy definitely wants peace. The bad guy is standing in the way of a settlement. Consequently, the only way to secure peace is for the good guy to inflict more death on the bad guy. Increasing the body count on the bad guy’s side, while regrettable, is now the fastest way to stop death.

This is the same moral logic that the Biden administration and NATO employed to support Ukraine—the way to end the war is to raise the cost to the party responsible for the conflict—but with the identity of the guilty and the innocent parties reversed.

If you want to see where Trump’s position is going next, pay attention to the bleatings of his closest supporters, who echo his impulses and point it in new directions. Elon Musk, for example, has begun demanding sanctions on Ukraine’s “oligarchs” and blaming them for American support for Kyiv. This is an echo of Putin’s long-standing claim that Ukraine is dominated by an unrepresentative class of oligarchs who have steered it away from its desired and natural place as a Russian vassal. The fixation with Ukraine’s corruption and the push to replace Zelensky both reflect Russian war aims. Putin wishes to delegitimize any Ukrainian government mirroring its population’s desire for independence, which would allow him to control the country either directly or through a puppet leader, like the kind he enjoyed before 2014 and has in Belarus today.

Ukraine certainly has its share of wealthy, influential business owners, but not nearly to the extent of Russia itself, whose entire economy is structured around oligarchic domination. And Trump is even less disturbed by corruption than he is by a lack of democracy. His administration’s earliest moves included defending or pardoning American politicians charged with corruption and ending enforcement of restrictions on bribing foreign governments. For that matter, Musk himself, who has obliterated conflict-of-interest guardrails by running much of the federal government while operating businesses with massive interest in public policy, fits the definition of oligarch neatly.

Senator Mark Kelly recently visited Ukraine and wrote on X, “Any agreement has to protect Ukraine’s security and can’t be a giveaway to Putin.” (His post did not mention Trump.) Musk replied, “You are a traitor,” which would be a rather odd sentiment unless one considered Ukraine an enemy of the United States. Where Musk is going, Trump is likely to follow.

[Anne Applebaum: The rise of the Brutal American]

Trump inherited an American government pushing to defend Ukrainian sovereignty. He has reversed American policy rapidly. The American position has already passed the point of neutrality. The new American goal is no longer simply to end the war, but to end it on Putin’s terms. Asked on Fox News Sunday if he was comfortable with the possibility that his actions would threaten Ukraine’s survival, Trump responded blithely, “Well, it may not survive anyway.” That is not merely a prediction. It is the goal.

One response to the egregious, often cruel actions of the Trump administration is outrage. That’s understandable, but mostly counterproductive, and, worse, a reaction that Donald Trump’s supporters enjoy. Ice is more advisable than fire in this situation, and the situation is better assessed with a cold head than a hot one.

Broadly speaking, there are three streams of influence on the administration. Trump’s vindictive, amoral, autocratic, and ignorant personality is the most obvious one. No less important, though, is the influence of marginal intellectuals and podcast ranters, who provide ideas for an angry but empty man. These ideas range from the merely dangerous (the unitary executive) to the religiously authoritarian (Seven Mountains Dominionism, or Catholic integralism) to the deranged (let’s get to the bottom of the John F. Kennedy assassination, shall we?). There are, finally, the structural elements and conditions that brought us to this moment: the loss of manufacturing jobs to China and other countries, the pervasive failures of American governing elites, and the popular rejection of identity-driven policies.

This mix of influences holds true ofor foreign policy as well. Trump’s policy toward Europe, and specifically Ukraine, is motivated by his understanding of NATO as a mismanaged protection racket, his animus toward Ukraine, and his warmth toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. Alongside these idiosyncratic grievances of a man who cannot separate the personal from the public, however, are ideas that Trump has absorbed from those around him.

The so-called international-relations realists, and even the advocates of the “restrainer” school of American foreign policy, have the unrealistic notion that values should play no role in foreign policy and an unrelieved contempt for those who think otherwise. They are tempted to play at being Metternich. This was on display, for example, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested to a journalist from Breitbart News that although the United States might not be completely successful at prying apart Russia and China, we could at least try to do so, apparently understanding as we do Russia’s interests better than Moscow does.

[Read: Helping Ukraine is Europe’s job now]

In this case, the secretary (not to mention his interviewer) forgot that the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China had coame at a time when Russia and China had waged a border war against each other and the Soviet Union was contemplating a preemptive strike on the Chinese nuclear arsenal. The tinhorn Talleyrands of Foggy Bottom might also have considered that suave statesmen do not announce to a crackpot news outlet that splitting the enemy coalition is the purpose of their European policy.

The idea—and it is an idea, though a very bad one—that the administration will make the United States safer by cutting a deal with Russia over the heads of our European allies is the kind of folly that only mediocre statesmen who think they are sophisticated tough guys can come up with. Such a deal would undermine America’s greatest international strengths—its alliances and its credibility—and reward two malicious powers whose hostility is profound, deeply rooted (in ideology and in fear of democratic contagion), and ineluctable. Or as my grandmother once said about someone who thought themselves clever, “Smart, smart, stupid.”

But it is also crucial to grasp the underlying forces at work here. Europe’s long dependence upon the United States for its fundamental security is untenable. This has been clear for a very long time indeed—so clear, in fact, that even as a naive, newly minted assistant professor, I understood it more than 40 years ago:

The greatest danger to the Alliance arises from the psychological relationship between the United States and an Old World dependent for its very survival on the arms of the New. As Raymond Aron has said, “By its very nature, Western Europe’s dependence on the United States for its own defense is unhealthy.” Once Europe had recovered from the devastation of World War II—let us say, for the sake of convenience, by 1960—the relationship of protector and protected was likely to evoke arrogance and condescension from the one side, resentment and irresponsibility from the other.

The eruptions of the Trump administration against NATO come in this context; conceivably, they were bound to come. Versions of the same critique, with much less vitriol, have been offered repeatedly, including by far friendlier administrations.

[Read: Trump sided with Putin. What should Europe do now?]

Deeper yet, European trust in a benign and protecting United States is the product of some selective memory. AlthoughWhile it is true that for nearly 80 years, the United States extended protection, including its nuclear umbrella, over Europe, let us not forget the bitter acrimony that has periodically beset the alliance. Furious debates over the rearmament of Germany, America’s betrayal of Britain and France during the Suez Crisis of 1956, mass hostility over the Vietnam War, the deep European antipathy to the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces to Europe, and American skepticism toward German Ostpolitik, not to mention the various perturbations of American economic and monetary policy, created repeated alliance crises. For that matter, this American visiting Europe in 2003, on the eve of the Iraq War, could not expect and did not receive an altogether pleasant reception.

The East European states have reason for warmer feelings towardabout the United States, which in the later stages of the Cold War did indeed help them with covert aid. But they are not entirely wrong to have felt abandoned by Washington before that and stymied in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse by American administrations that, rather than exploit Russia’s weakness, chose to appease the countryit, and were reluctant to admit them into NATO.

But the roots of U.S.-European tension are even more profound. Those 80 years of alliance were anomalous. Over a near quarter millennium, the relationship has been ambivalent. Most Americans descend from people who departed Europe in search of a new and better life. We are the people who left, and for the most part are glad we did. War with European powers occurred periodically, and could have been worse—France and the United States came close to blows over Mexico after the Civil War, and the lovely fortifications in Quebec City were designed to defend against American fleets. For their part, American leaders knew full well that the governments of France and Great Britain greatly preferred the Confederacy to the Union, and would not have been displeased at the breakup of, as it was then known, the Great Republic.

During the wWorld wWars, the United States exploited its European partners and allies. It demanded repayment of loans made in the first war in a common cause, and used its leverage in the second to break up Britain’s imperial preference system and speed up the collapse of the European empires. The Marshall Plan was magnificent, but it was also an act of self-interest. And from the American point of view, it was enough that thrice in the 20th century, the United States rescued Europe from what, viewed in the largest perspective, were three attempts at collective suicide driven by nationalism, fascism, and Communism.

Americans and Europeans have been different and remain so, even if it is now possible to get excellent wine, bread, and coffee in the United States and jeans and rap music in Europe. Their concepts of liberty, free speech, and the appropriate roles of government are not the same, as J. D. Vance noted at the Munich Security Conference, although he should have had the courtesy and good sense to emphasize how much we have in common, and acknowledge that the differences were none of his business.

[Read: ‘What the hell is happening to your country?’]

The cast of mind has ever been different. As Henry Adams said, “The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest.” True enough, and the fact that English is now the lingua franca of Europe does not make American politics and culture any more transparent or predictable to those who reside on the other side of the Atlantic.

In the long run, a more normal kind of American administration will return. With it will also return productive and predictable relationships, cooperation, and friendship. But after the past two months, there cannot, and should not ever be, trust. One Trump administration was a mistake; two Trump administrations will be read, correctly, as a divergence that can never be repaired. The Atlantic alliance can be rebuilt, but its foundations will never be the same, and in some ways that is not an entirely bad thing. A well-armed Europe—even including, as the Polish prime minister has recently suggested, one with a larger group of nuclear powers—will be a good thing. A Europe free of its unnatural material and psychological dependence on the United States will benefit both sides.

As for the Trump administration, however, the mistrust should be of a completely different order. The man, the ideas, and the structural conditions have created a hellish synthesis, and Europe faces at this moment the utmost peril. If it frees itself of its psychological dependence, opens its treasuries, and unleashes the energy of its democratic societies, it can defend itself, including Ukraine. In the meanwhile, and with the deepest regret, I say that any European leader who believes any promise that comes out of the mouth of a Trump-administration official is a fool. For four years at least, you are in grave danger, because you simply cannot trust us.

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