Judge Tanya Chutkan has ruled against a 14-state effort to get a restraining order against DOGE efforts to access data.

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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 to upend social-welfare programs, alter law-enforcement directives, and sidestep 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.”

Illustration by The Atlantic: Sources: Getty.

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

During Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation hearing, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, both Democrats and Republicans, repeatedly asked the soon-to-be director of national intelligence whether Edward Snowden was a traitor for releasing thousands of classified documents that revealed clandestine U.S. sources and methods. And repeatedly Gabbard declined to condemn Snowden beyond the tepid acknowledgment that he’d broken the law. Even at that, she praised him for exposing a secret program.

All nine Republicans on the Intelligence Committee, and every Republican senator except Mitch McConnell, nonetheless voted to confirm her to lead America’s 18 intelligence agencies. Among her responsibilities, she will be delivering a daily brief to the president that curates analysis of the country’s most urgent problems.

Gabbard has hardly demonstrated the judgment necessary for the task. In 2013, overwhelming evidence, including expert U.S.-intelligence analysis, showed that the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons on his people. Gabbard was unwilling to believe it, perhaps because the conclusion did not accord with her preconceived ideas about the Syrian civil conflict. This is the stance of someone likely to either miss or reject warnings of emergent threats. And it’s not the only sign that the Trump administration is putting American security at risk.

Gabbard’s appointment is just one factor leading American allies, including but not limited to the “Five Eyes” states (the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, in addition to the U.S.), to worry about whether they can securely share intelligence with the Trump administration. The Five Eyes extend the geographical reach of U.S. intelligence coverage and provide assessments that can increase or even usefully challenge U.S. findings. This input plays a part in calibrating the confidence that U.S. agencies have in their own conclusions. Australia’s intelligence services, for example, were the first to understand the risks that Huawei components posed for Western telecommunications networks. Their findings drove investigations in the U.S. and U.K. that led allied countries to strip Huawei hardware out of their 5G networks.  

[Shane Harris: Elon Musk is breaking the national-security system]

Without allied cooperation, Washington will soon be operating on a fraction of the insight it once had into foreign threats. And the U.S. will need that supplemental intelligence more than ever, because the Trump administration has hobbled its own premier intelligence-gathering agency by offering career-terminating buyouts to all CIA employees. Those who leave will take with them decades of experience running agents, understanding how foreign governments operate, building trust with international counterparts, and spotting meaningful anomalies.

Turning over the entire intelligence workforce will set the United States back incalculably in terms of its ability to both understand the world and act effectively against its adversaries. Consider Iran, an opaque, authoritarian foe whose powerful supreme leader is 85 years old. When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dies, events will unfold quickly on the ground: internal power struggles in Tehran, opportunistic maneuvers in the region. The U.S. government will not want to be on a learning curve at that moment—it will need experienced hands who can penetrate, analyze, and influence developments in real time. Instead the Trump administration is choosing to put the United States at a deficit.

The same is true in the global influence stakes. U.S. adversaries, including Russia and China, are engaged in information operations that actively seek to polarize and inflame American society. The new U.S. administration appears to be ceding that ground to them. The State Department office that combats foreign state-sponsored disinformation had already closed. Now the Department of Homeland Security has put staff members who work on foreign influence operations on administrative leave. The FBI has closed its foreign influence task force. The National Security Agency will likely be next: Gabbard has evinced both a flawed understanding of its governing legislation and a deep suspicion that the agency endangers civil liberties. But hostile governments will be the ones endangering America’s civil liberties, and manipulating its public discourse, if the U.S. allows them to participate unrestrainedly in its domestic political space.

America’s foes are surely observing the chaos in Washington and looking for espionage opportunities. They will find them. Four weeks into Donald Trump’s new administration, lax security practices have created all manner of risk. The CIA has provided employee data on unsecured systems. Staff members from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are downloading onto private servers information that foreign governments would pay dearly for (or use other espionage techniques to obtain). DOGE is apparently cavalier about exposing American citizens to danger—and about the government’s duty of care in protecting the identities of those who protect the country. The Bureau of Fiscal Services recommends that DOGE’s access to Treasury’s payments system be monitored as an insider threat.

[Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost: The government’s computing experts say they are terrified]

This administration is still in its early days. The courts or Congress could reassert their constitutional prerogatives and slow or stop some of these actions. But the upheaval that has already occurred in the departments responsible for national security, together with the deficiencies of judgment displayed by some of the president’s Cabinet appointees, has already made America more vulnerable and less equipped to understand the threats it faces.

The Onion has headlined a satirical article “FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot to Just Sit Back and Enjoy Collapse of United States.” Americans will be lucky if that’s all their adversaries do.

One of the greatest tricks that Donald Trump and Elon Musk ever pulled is to convince millions of people that DOGE, the self-styled Department of Government Efficiency, is about government efficiency.

DOGE isn’t really a department; it’s not an agency; it has no statutory authority; and it has little to do with saving money, streamlining the bureaucracy, or eliminating waste. It is a name that Trump is allowing a favored donor and ally to use in a reckless campaign against various targets in the federal government. The whole enterprise is an attack against civil servants and the very notion of apolitical expertise.

Trump allies make noises about expert failures—and yes, experts sometimes do fail. In particular, MAGA world continues to demonize what its constituents believe was the medical establishment’s attempt to curtail civil rights during the coronavirus pandemic. (Those are arguable charges; Trump himself presided over a wave of shutdowns in 2020.) None of these complaints explains why DOGE teams have been unleashed in places such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the National Reconnaissance Office, which is responsible for American spy satellites. Worse, Musk’s team accidentally posted sensitive information from NRO in what one intelligence official called a “significant breach” of security.

[Theodore Roosevelt: An object lesson in civil-service reform]

DOGE also blundered into dismissing hundreds of people from the National Nuclear Safety Administration, the agency within the Energy Department that is responsible for the stewardship of the nation’s nuclear-weapons stockpile. It’s one thing to be angry about having to wear a mask at Costco; it’s another to engage in the apparent indiscriminate firing of more than 300 people who keep watch over nuclear materials. (The agency backtracked on Friday and rescinded some of those terminations.)

Populists are generally wary of experts, especially those who work for the government, but Musk is no man of the people: He is the richest human being in the world, and he runs major companies that rely both on government-provided expertise and significant government subsidies. As my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote, “Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut”—a willful indifference that gives away the game.

Musk’s assault on expertise is coming from the same wellspring that has been driving much of the public’s irrational hostility toward experts for years. I have been studying “the death of expertise” for more than a decade, and I have written extensively about the phenomenon in which uninformed laypeople come to believe that they are smarter and more capable in almost any subject than experts. The death of expertise is really about the rise of two social ills: narcissism and resentment.

Self-absorption is common these days, but Musk embodies a particular brand of narcissism found among certain kinds of techno-plutocrats who assume that their wealth is evidence of competence in almost any field. After all, if you’ve made a zillion dollars inventing an app, how hard can anything else be? And although it is a truism at this point to observe that Trump is narcissistic, one thing that binds Trump and Musk and many others is their sense that their talent and inherent greatness have been dismissed by experts. Much like ordinary citizens who have “done their own research” and yet are furious that doctors won’t listen to them, Trump and Musk seem constantly angry that their wealth and power can gain them anything except respect.

You can see this resentment almost every time President Trump (and Co-President Musk) speak. No one is allowed to know more about anything than Trump. When pressed, Trump will defensively say things such as “I’ve read a lot on it,” an implausible claim from a man who is famously reluctant to read. Musk, for his part, commands a personal fortune so large that it dwarfs the GDP of many small countries, and he brags about having a top U.S. security clearance—but he bristles at any doubts about whether he is, in fact, the most accomplished player of the video game Diablo IV.

For Trump and his allies, this kind of resentment is tightly threaded into  practical and self-interested concerns: Apolitical experts in a democracy are a strong line of defense against politically motivated chicanery. Meanwhile, Musk and others believe that money should translate directly into power, and that their wealth should confer intellectual legitimacy. Such people chafe at the reality that getting their way still sometimes requires arguing with experts, and that opposing those experts requires knowledge. Their solution is not to listen or learn but to try to replace those troublesome pencil necks with pliable servants.

I’ve experienced this phenomenon firsthand: More than a year ago, Musk’s occasional sidekick David Sacks was so offended by an online disagreement with me about the Russia-Ukraine war that he publicly made a large donation to the GoFundMe page of a part-time professor in Canada whose views more closely aligned with his own. He did this in my name, as if that would help him gain the upper hand in an argument that required facts and expertise.

[Robert P. Beschel Jr.: Making government efficient again]

Another dynamic at play is that Trump, Musk, and many others treat “experts” and “elites” as functionally indistinguishable. This is a dishonest claim, but it is useful in mobilizing public sentiment against experts in the name of a mindless egalitarianism. It is also part of the overall ruse: The DOGE assault has nothing to do with merit or equality. Indeed, Musk’s attack on federal agencies, with one group of privileged and educated people trying to displace another, is the most intra-elite squabble Washington has seen in years.

A similar resentment may also drive the young volunteers who are waving Musk’s name in front of career government servants. Washington has always been full of disappointed strivers who feel they’ve been kept out of the game by snotty social and intellectual gatekeepers—and, as a former young striver in the capital, I can affirm that there’s some truth in that. Now they’re in charge and more than ready to become obnoxious new elitists themselves. (“Do I need to call Elon?” one young DOGE-nik reportedly snapped when a federal official had the temerity to deny him access to sensitive information.)

In the early 20th century, the Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset warned that such resentment would eventually become the enemy of talent and ability. “The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different,” he wrote in 1930, “everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.” Trump and Musk not only feel this same impulse; they have harnessed it for their personal use.

Eventually, such attacks run out of steam when the costs begin to accumulate. No matter how many times Stalin told his scientists to plant wheat in the snow so that it could evolve to grow in the winter, the wheat (which had no political allegiances) died. Today, vaccine refusal might seem like a brave stand against white-jacketed overlords—until your children are stricken with measles or whooping cough.

Modern societies, as Americans are soon to learn, cannot function without experts in every field, especially the many thousands who work in public service. The first step in containing the damage is to see Trump’s and Musk’s goals for DOGE clearly: It is a project rooted in resentful arrogance, and its true objective is not better government, but destruction.

Democratic lawmakers express concern that Tesla CEO is seeking to weaponise the tax system against his rivals.