What Essential Jobs Will DOGE’s AI Mass-Firing Tool Accidentally Cut?

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is working on an artificial intelligence tool that can automate its sweeping (sometimes mistaken) cuts to the federal work force, Wired reported Tuesday.

Engineers at DOGE have been working on AutoRIF, a program developed by the Department of Defense. Its name stands for Automated Reduction in Force, and it has the capability to automatically generate lists of government employees, ranking them in order of how subject they are to being fired—a task traditionally done by human resources—a former government H.R. employee told Wired.

“However, even with the use of any automated system, the OPM guidance says all data has to be confirmed manually and that employees (or their representative) are allowed to examine the registers,” the employee added.

DOGE employees appeared to have accessed AutoRIF’s code in the Office of Personnel Management’s system, and have begun editing its code. The screenshots indicate that one DOGE employee, Riccardo Biasini, a former engineer at Tesla, has been shearing the code.

Federal government employees are bracing themselves for a second round of sweeping, government-wide layoffs. The first round of layoffs earlier this month targeted probationary employees, who have worked for the government for less than a year and lack the same protections as their colleagues.

So far, the sweeping layoffs that have helped contribute to the whopping 95,000 eliminated government jobs have all been determined by human beings who combed through government databases looking for employees to prune.

But DOGE’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce have already led to significant issues, as essential workers are mistakenly dismissed and government agencies are sent scrambling to hire them back.

Earlier this month, the Department of Agriculture needed to rescind the terminations of “several” agency employees who were actively working to address the ongoing bird flu outbreak. A whopping 300 employees who oversee America’s nuclear stockpile were fired from the National Nuclear Security Administration and then quickly invited to return to their highly essential jobs. In another close call, approximately 950 employees at the Indian Health Service were informed that they would receive termination notices, but their jobs were miraculously saved by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the last minute.

It’s not clear that employing an AI model would help to mitigate these mistakes, only make the pruning of federal employees that much more inhuman.

The White House wants everyone to know that the Department of Government Efficiency is incredibly transparent. They also don’t want you to know who’s actually running it.

During a White House press briefing Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt refused to name the administrator of DOGE, and in the same breath lauded the Trump administration’s transparency on the inner workings of its government-destroying machine. 

One reporter asked Leavitt to follow up on a hearing that had taken place the day before in Washington, where a Justice Department lawyer had openly admitted to the judge that he didn’t know who the administrator of DOGE was, while defending the organization’s unfettered access to sensitive government records. 

“Can you tell us who the administrator of DOGE is?” the reporter asked Leavitt.  

“Again, I’ve been asked and answered this question,” Leavitt replied, proceeding not to answer it. “Elon Musk is overseeing DOGE. There are—”

“Is he the administrator?” the reporter pressed. 

“No, Elon Musk is a special government employee, which I’ve also been asked and have answered that question as well,” Leavitt said.

“Who is the administrator?” the reporter pressed again. 

“There are career officials at DOGE. There are political appointees at DOGE. I am not going to reveal the name of that individual from this podium,” Leavitt said. 

“I am happy to follow up and provide that to you, but we have been incredibly transparent about the way that DOGE is working.”

To lend some perspective on the Trump administration’s obvious obfuscation, there is no reason to keep the identity of anyone running a federal department secret—and the names of those people are both in the public interest and publicly available, with the one exception of DOGE.

Only after the press briefing did it come out that Amy Gleason is the acting director of DOGE. It’s not clear she knows this, however—she was in Mexico when reached by reporters, despite the fact that the DOGE head has made in-office work a centerpiece of his reign of terror.

Gleason has served as the “senior adviser” to the U.S. Digital Service since the beginning of January, according to her LinkedIn page. Gleason previously worked for the USDS between 2018 and 2021. 

The USDS was originally an Obama-era group created to respond to issues with the Affordable Care Act’s website, and it later served as a port of technologists responsible for updating government technology services. Upon entering office, Trump issued an executive order rebranding the agency as DOGE. 

It’s unclear whether Gleason outranks Musk, the billionaire bureaucrat the Trump administration insists maintains the reins on its budget-slashing operation. Nor, for that matter, is it clear if she actually has any meaningful authority at DOGE—or if she’s just a front for Musk. 

The Trump administration has decided to take over determining the press pool that covers the White House, shutting out the White House Correspondents’ Association. 

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Tuesday that the White House’s press team would take over the press pool, effectively determining which journalists get to travel with Donald  Trump for their news coverage. 

“We want more outlets and new outlets to have a chance to take part in the press pool to cover this administration’s unprecedented achievements up close, front and center,” Leavitt said. “We are going to give the power back to the people who read your papers, who watch your television shows, and who listen to your radio stations.”

On Monday, a federal court ruled against restoring the Associated Press’s access to White House press events, causing Leavitt to declare victory and insist that “covering the American presidency in the most intimate and limited spaces in this White House … is a privilege, it is not a legal right.” The AP has been barred ever since Trump signed an executive order to change the Gulf of Mexico’s name to the Gulf of America, a change the wire service has not adopted. 

The WHCA issued a statement criticizing the Trump administration’s move, claiming that the White House gave no notice of the change and saying that it “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States.”

“Since its founding in 1914, the WHCA has sought to ensure that the reporters, photographers, producers and technicians who actually do the work—365 days of every year—decide amongst themselves how these rotations are operated, so as to ensure consistent professional standards and fairness in access on behalf of all readers, viewers and listeners,” WHCA President Eugene Daniels, a correspondent for Politico, said. 

It’s an unprecedented move for a president to determine the journalists that travel with him. In the past, presidents usually ignored the media outlets or journalists that they did not like, instead of barring them from the White House or Air Force One. The famously thin-skinned Trump has already filed lawsuits against media organizations he doesn’t like and is using the Federal Communications Commission to go after broadcast outlets that irk him. Now he’s trying to dictate news coverage of his administration. 

DOGE deleted the top five highest savings claims on its “wall of receipts” leaderboard after various news outlets pointed out multiple errors in its calculations, The New York Times’ David Fahrenthold reported Tuesday.

The savings, deleted with no explanation from DOGE or the White House, include: a $232 million cut to the Social Security Administration that actually amounted to only $560,000; an $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement that was actually only $8 million; and three $655 million cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development that ended up being a measly $18 million. These mistakes all seem to be completely avoidable human errors.

The bottom of DOGE’s savings list reads: “Scoreboard normalized to agency size and budget.

“This is a preliminary leaderboard, and there will likely be some initial mistakes in the relative rankings.”

DOGE had claimed earlier this week that it has saved $65 billion thanks to all of its cuts. Its website still boasts this number, despite the recently deleted claims.

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to stop its U.S. Agency for International Development spending freeze, giving the government an 11:59 p.m. deadline on Wednesday to pay “all invoices and letter of credit drawdown requests” for work done prior to February 13.

Judge Amir Ali granted the motion to enforce his restraining order against the USAID budget freeze on Tuesday, noting that the Trump administration could take “no action to impede foreign assistance funds for work already completed,” according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

The motion comes nearly two weeks after Ali initially ordered the White House to stop withholding congressionally appropriated humanitarian aid that was supposed to be distributed by the agency. In his ruling, the judge underscored the financial devastation wreaked on the nation’s suppliers and nonprofits—who work in tandem with USAID to supply humanitarian assistance—by the spontaneous disruption.

Ali ultimately declined a request by a coalition of nonprofits to find the Trump administration in contempt of the order, though the judge did find that the White House was seemingly wasting time in order to cook up “a new, post hoc rationalization for the en masse suspension.”

The continued inaction led to a fiery moment between Ali and a Justice Department attorney on Tuesday, in which the judge became increasingly irate that the Trump administration could not point to any concrete actions they had taken to implement the restraining order.

“I don’t know why I can’t get a straight answer from you,” Ali said, according to Cheney. “Are you aware of an unfreezing of the disbursement of funds for those contracts and agreements that were frozen before February 13?”

“I’m not in a position to answer that,” the DOJ attorney responded.

USAID provides humanitarian assistance and funding for infrastructure and developmental tech in developing nations. The information obtained through the agency’s work immediately aids and shields American citizens. Data aggregated from aid missions around the world inform U.S. policy on issues ranging from public health to diplomacy. Earlier this month, news that there was an Ebola outbreak in Kampala, Uganda, was reported via a USAID mission, for example. Choosing to nix the agency would force the U.S. into an information dark age that could see the country caught off guard in future health crises.

Trump’s right-hand man Elon Musk has made it a personal mission to dismantle USAID. Earlier this month, Musk slammed USAID—which distributed more than $40 billion in congressionally appropriated foreign aid in 2023 and has closed $86 billion in private-sector deals—as a “criminal organization” that is an “arm of the radical-left globalists.”