doge

Trump admin tells Supreme Court: DOGE needs to do its work in secret

doge, Policy / DJ Henderson / May 22, 2025

DOJ complains of “sweeping, intrusive discovery” after DOGE refused FOIA requests.

A protest over DOGE’s reductions to the federal workforce outside the Jacob K. Javits Federal Office Building on March 19, 2025 in New York City. Credit: Getty Images | Michael M. Santiago

The Department of Justice today asked the Supreme Court to block a ruling that requires DOGE to provide information about its government cost-cutting operations as part of court-ordered discovery.

President Trump’s Justice Department sought an immediate halt to orders issued by US District Court for the District of Columbia. US Solicitor General John Sauer argued that the Department of Government Efficiency is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) as a presidential advisory body and not an official “agency.”

The district court “ordered USDS [US Doge Service] to submit to sweeping, intrusive discovery just to determine if USDS is subject to FOIA in the first place,” Sauer wrote. “That order turns FOIA on its head, effectively giving respondent a win on the merits of its FOIA suit under the guise of figuring out whether FOIA even applies. And that order clearly violates the separation of powers, subjecting a presidential advisory body to intrusive discovery and threatening the confidentiality and candor of its advice, putatively to address a legal question that never should have necessitated discovery in this case at all.”

The nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed FOIA requests seeking information about DOGE and sued after DOGE officials refused to provide the requested records.

US District Judge Christopher Cooper has so far sided with CREW. Cooper decided in March that “USDS is likely covered by FOIA and that the public would be irreparably harmed by an indefinite delay in unearthing the records CREW seeks,” ordering DOGE “to process CREW’s request on an expedited timetable.”

Judge: DOGE is not just an advisor

DOGE then asked the district court for a summary judgment in its favor, and CREW responded by filing a motion for expedited discovery “seeking information relevant to whether USDS wields substantial authority independent of the President and is therefore subject to FOIA.” In an April 15 order, Cooper ruled that CREW is entitled to limited discovery into the question of whether DOGE is wielding authority sufficient to bring it within the purview of FOIA. Cooper hasn’t yet ruled on the motion for summary judgment.

“The structure of USDS and the scope of its authority are critical to determining whether the agency is ‘wield[ing] substantial authority independently of the President,'” the judge wrote. “And the answers to those questions are unclear from the record.”

Trump’s executive orders appear to support CREW’s argument by suggesting “that USDS is exercising substantial independent authority,” Cooper wrote. “As the Court already noted, the executive order establishing USDS ‘to implement the President’s DOGE Agenda’ appears to give USDS the authority to carry out that agenda, ‘not just to advise the President in doing so.'”

Not satisfied with the outcome, the Trump administration tried to get Cooper’s ruling overturned in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The appeals court ruled against DOGE last week. The appeals court temporarily stayed the district court order in April but dissolved the stay on May 14 and denied the government’s petition.

“The government contends that the district court’s order permitting narrow discovery impermissibly intrudes upon the President’s constitutional prerogatives,” the appeals court said. But “the discovery here is modest in scope and does not target the President or any close adviser personally. The government retains every conventional tool to raise privilege objections on the limited question-by-question basis foreseen here on a narrow and discrete ground.”

US argues for secrecy

A three-judge panel at the appeals court was unswayed by the government’s claim that this process is too burdensome.

“Although the government protests that any such assertion of privilege would be burdensome, the only identified burdens are limited both by time and reach, covering as they do records within USDS’s control generated since January 20,” the ruling said. “It does not provide any specific details as to why accessing its own records or submitting to two depositions would pose an unbearable burden.”

Yesterday, the District Court set a discovery schedule requiring the government to produce all responsive documents within 14 days and complete depositions within 24 days. In its petition to the Supreme Court today, the Trump administration argued that DOGE’s recommendations to the president should be kept secret:

The district court’s requirement that USDS turn over the substance of its recommendations—even when the recommendations were “purely advisory”—epitomizes the order’s overbreadth and intrusiveness. The court’s order compels USDS to identify every “federal agency contract, grant, lease or similar instrument that any DOGE employee or DOGE Team member recommended that federal agencies cancel or rescind,” and every “federal agency employee or position that any DOGE employee or DOGE team member recommended” for termination or placement on administrative leave. Further, USDS must state “whether [each] recommendation was followed.”

It is difficult to imagine a more grievous intrusion and burden on a presidential advisory body. Providing recommendations is the core of what USDS does. Because USDS coordinates with agencies across the Executive Branch on an ongoing basis, that request requires USDS to review multitudes of discussions that USDS has had every day since the start of this Administration. And such information likely falls within the deliberative-process privilege almost by definition, as internal executive-branch recommendations are inherently “pre-decisional” and “deliberative.”

Lawsuit: “No meaningful transparency” into DOGE

The US further said the discovery “is unnecessary to answer the legal question whether USDS qualifies as an ‘agency’ that is subject to FOIA,” and is merely “a fishing expedition into USDS’s advisory activities under the guise of determining whether USDS engages in non-advisory activities—an approach to discovery that would be improper in any circumstance.”

CREW, like others that have sued the government over DOGE’s operations, says the entity exercises significant power without proper oversight and transparency. DOGE “has worked in the shadows—a cadre of largely unidentified actors, whose status as government employees is unclear, controlling major government functions with no oversight,” CREW’s lawsuit said. “USDS has provided no meaningful transparency into its operations or assurances that it is maintaining proper records of its unprecedented and legally dubious work.”

The Trump administration is fighting numerous DOGE-related lawsuits at multiple levels of the court system. Earlier this month, the administration asked the Supreme Court to restore DOGE’s access to Social Security Administration records after losing on the issue in both a district court and appeals court. That request to the Supreme Court is pending.

There was also a dispute over discovery when 14 states sued the federal government over Trump “delegat[ing] virtually unchecked authority to Mr. Musk without proper legal authorization from Congress and without meaningful supervision of his activities.” A federal judge ruled that the states could serve written discovery requests on Musk and DOGE, but the DC Circuit appeals court blocked the discovery order. In that case, appeals court judges said the lower-court judge should have ruled on a motion to dismiss before allowing discovery.

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

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Report: DOGE supercharges mass-layoff software, renames it to sound less dystopian

department of government efficiency, doge, elon musk, layoffs, Policy, trump administration / Beth Washington / May 8, 2025

“It is not clear how AutoRIF has been modified or whether AI is involved in the RIF mandate (through AutoRIF or independently),” Kunkler wrote. “However, fears of AI-driven mass-firings of federal workers are not unfounded. Elon Musk and the Trump Administration have made no secret of their affection for the dodgy technology and their intentions to use it to make budget cuts. And, in fact, they have already tried adding AI to workforce decisions.”

Automating layoffs can perpetuate bias, increase worker surveillance, and erode transparency to the point where workers don’t know why they were let go, Kunkler said. For government employees, such imperfect systems risk triggering confusion over worker rights or obscuring illegal firings.

“There is often no insight into how the tool works, what data it is being fed, or how it is weighing different data in its analysis,” Kunkler said. “The logic behind a given decision is not accessible to the worker and, in the government context, it is near impossible to know how or whether the tool is adhering to the statutory and regulatory requirements a federal employment tool would need to follow.”

The situation gets even starker when you imagine mistakes on a mass scale. Don Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, told Reuters that “if you automate bad assumptions into a process, then the scale of the error becomes far greater than an individual could undertake.”

“It won’t necessarily help them to make better decisions, and it won’t make those decisions more popular,” Moynihan said.

The only way to shield workers from potentially illegal firings, Kunkler suggested, is to support unions defending worker rights while pushing lawmakers to intervene. Calling on Congress to ban the use of shadowy tools relying on unknown data points to gut federal agencies “without requiring rigorous external testing and auditing, robust notices and disclosure, and human decision review,” Kunkler said rolling out DOGE’s new tool without more transparency should be widely condemned as unacceptable.

“We must protect federal workers from these harmful tools,” Kunkler said, adding, “If the government cannot or will not effectively mitigate the risks of using automated decision-making technology, it should not use it at all.”

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Trump’s NIH ignored court order, cut research grants anyway

doge, health, NIH, syndication, Trump, whistleblower / DJ Henderson / May 8, 2025

Officials testified that DOGE was directly involved in hundreds of grant terminations.

For more than two months, the Trump administration has been subject to a federal court order stopping it from cutting funding related to gender identity and the provision of gender-affirming care in response to President Donald Trump’s executive orders.

Lawyers for the federal government have repeatedly claimed in court filings that the administration has been complying with the order.

But new whistleblower records submitted in a lawsuit led by the Washington state attorney general appear to contradict the claim.

Nearly two weeks after the court’s preliminary injunction was issued, the National Institutes of Health’s then-acting head, Dr. Matthew J. Memoli, drafted a memo that details how the agency, in response to Trump’s executive orders, cut funding for research grants that “promote or inculcate gender ideology.” An internal spreadsheet of terminated NIH grants also references “gender ideology” and lists the number associated with Trump’s executive order as the reason for the termination of more than a half dozen research grants.

The Washington attorney general’s allegation that the Trump administration violated a court order comes as the country lurches toward a constitutional crisis amid accusations that the executive branch has defied or ignored court orders in several other cases. In the most high-profile case so far, the administration has yet to comply with a federal judge’s order, upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court, requiring it to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March.

The records filed in the NIH-related lawsuit last week also reveal for the first time the enormous scope of the administration’s changes to the agency, which has been subject to massive layoffs and research cuts to align it with the president’s political priorities.

Other documents filed in the case raise questions concerning a key claim the administration has made about how it is restructuring federal agencies—that the Department of Government Efficiency has limited authority, acting mostly as an advisory body that consults on what to cut. However, in depositions filed in the case last week, two NIH officials testified that DOGE itself gave directions in hundreds of grant terminations.

The lawsuit offers an unprecedented view into the termination of more than 600 grants at the NIH over the past two months. Many of the canceled grants appear to have focused on subjects that the administration claims are unscientific or that the agency should no longer focus on under new priorities, such as gender identity, vaccine hesitancy, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Grants related to research in China have also been cut, and climate change projects are under scrutiny.

Andrew G. Nixon, the director of communications for the Department of Health and Human Services, the NIH’s parent agency, told ProPublica in an email that the grant terminations directly followed the president’s executive orders and that the NIH’s actions were based on policy and scientific priorities, not political interference.

“The cuts are essential to refocus NIH on key public health priorities, like the chronic disease epidemic,” he said. Nixon also told ProPublica that its questions related to the lawsuit “solely fit a partisan narrative”; he did not respond to specific questions about the preliminary injunction, the administration’s compliance with the order or the involvement of DOGE in the grant termination process. The White House did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.

Mike Faulk, the deputy communications director for the Washington state attorney general’s office, told ProPublica in an email that the administration “appears to have used DOGE in this instance to keep career NIH officials in the dark about what was happening and why.”

“While claiming to be transparent, DOGE has actively hidden its activities and its true motivations,” he said. “Our office will use every tool we have to uncover the truth about why these grants were terminated.”

Since Trump took office in January, the administration has provided limited insight into why it chose to terminate scientific and medical grants.

That decision-making process has been largely opaque, until now.

Washington fights to overturn grant termination

In February, Washington state—joined by Minnesota, Oregon, Colorado, and three physicians—sued the administration after it threatened to enforce its executive orders by withholding federal research grants from institutions that provided gender-affirming services or promoted “gender ideology.” Within weeks, a federal judge issued an injunction limiting the administration from fully enforcing the orders in the four states that are party to the suit.

The same day as the injunction, however, the NIH terminated a research grant to Seattle Children’s Hospital to develop and study an online education tool designed to reduce the risk of violence, mental health disorders and sexually transmitted infections among transgender youth, according to records filed in the court case. The NIH stated that it was the agency’s policy not to “prioritize” such studies on gender identity.

“Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans,” the notice stated, without citing any scientific evidence for its claims. The NIH sent another notice reiterating the termination four days later.

The Washington attorney general’s office requested the termination be withdrawn, citing the injunction. But the administration refused, claiming that it was in compliance as the termination was based on NIH’s own authority and grant policy and was not enforcing any executive order.

The Washington attorney general asked the judge to hold the administration in contempt for violating the injunction. While the request was denied, the court granted an expedited discovery process to better assess whether the administration had breached the injunction. That process would have required the administration to quickly turn over internal documents relating to the termination. In response, the administration reinstated the grant for Seattle Children’s Hospital and declared the discovery process moot, or no longer relevant. However, US District Judge Lauren J. King, who was appointed by former President Joseph Biden, permitted it to continue.

Whistleblower documents reveal sweeping changes at NIH

In recent months, whistleblowers have made the plaintiffs in the lawsuit aware of internal records that more closely connect the grant terminations to the administration’s executive orders.

In an internal spreadsheet of dozens of grants marked for cancellation at an NIH institute, the stated reason for termination for several was “gender ideology (EA 14168),” including the grant to Seattle Children’s Hospital.

The rationale appears to reference Executive Order 14168, which banned using federal funds to “promote gender ideology,” again seeming to conflict with the administration’s stance that the termination was not based on the executive orders. The termination dates of the grants, according to the spreadsheet, were after the injunction went into effect.

Another internal document, which provides extraordinary insight into the administration’s efforts to reshape the NIH, also states the executive order was the impetus for grant terminations.

In the March 11 memo from Memoli, the NIH cataloged all actions that the agency had taken thus far to align with the president’s executive orders. In a section detailing the steps taken to implement the “gender ideology” executive order, one of the 44 actions listed was the termination of active grants.

“NIH is currently reviewing all active grants and supplements to determine if they promote gender ideology and will take action as appropriate,” the memo stated, noting that the process was in progress.

While the administration has said in court filings that it is following the judge’s injunction order, the Washington state attorney general’s office told ProPublica that it disagreed.

“Their claim to have complied with the preliminary injunction is almost laughable,” said Faulk, the office’s deputy communications director. “The Trump administration is playing games with no apparent respect for the rule of law.”

Depositions reveal DOGE links

In depositions conducted last month as part of the lawsuit, the testimony of two NIH officials also raised questions about why the research grants were terminated and how DOGE was involved.

Liza Bundesen, who was the deputy director of the agency’s extramural research office, testified that she first learned of the grant terminations on February 28 from a DOGE team member, Rachel Riley. Bundesen said she was invited into a Microsoft Teams video call, where Riley introduced herself as being part of DOGE and working with the Department of Health and Human Services.

Riley, a former consultant for McKinsey & Co., joined HHS on January 27, according to court filings in a separate lawsuit, and has reportedly served as the DOGE point person at the NIH.

The executive order detailing DOGE’s responsibilities describes the cost-cutting team as advisers that consult agency heads on the termination of contracts and grants. No language in the orders gives the DOGE team members the authority to direct the cancellation of grants or contracts. However, the depositions portray Riley as giving directions on how to conduct the terminations.

“She informed me that a number of grants will need to be terminated,” Bundesen testified, adding that she was told that they needed to be terminated by the end of the day. “I did not ask what, you know, what grants because I just literally was a little bit confused and caught off guard.”

Bundesen said she then received an email from Memoli, the NIH acting director, with a spreadsheet listing the grants that needed to be canceled and a template letter for notifying researchers of the terminations.

“The template had boilerplate language that could then be modified for the different circumstances, the different buckets of grants that were to be terminated,” she said. “The categories were DEI, research in China and transgender or gender ideology.”

Bundesen forwarded the email with the spreadsheet to Michelle Bulls, who directs the agency’s Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration. Bundesen resigned from the NIH a week later, on March 7, citing “untenable” working conditions.

“I was given directives to implement with very short turnaround times, often close of business or maybe within the next hour,” she testified. “I was not offered the opportunity to provide feedback or really ask for clarification.”

Bulls confirmed in her own deposition that the termination list and letter template originally came from Riley. When Bulls started receiving the lists, she said she did what she was told. “I just followed the directive,” she said. “The language in the letters were provided so I didn’t question.”

Bulls said she didn’t write any of the letters herself and just signed her name to them. She also said she was not aware whether anyone had assessed the grants’ scientific merit or whether they met agency criteria. The grant terminations related to gender identity did not stem from an independent agency policy, she testified, appearing to contradict the administration’s assertion that they were based on the agency’s own authority and grant policy.

As of April 3, Bulls said she had received more than five lists of grants that needed to be terminated, amounting to “somewhere between five hundred and a thousand” grants.

Most grant recipients endure a rigorous vetting process, which can involve multiple stages of peer review before approval, and before this year, Bulls testified that grant terminations at the NIH have historically been rare. There are generally two main types of terminations, she said, for noncompliance or based on mutual agreement. Bulls said that she has been “generally involved in noncompliance discussions” and since she became the director of the office in 2012, there had been fewer than five such terminations.

In addition to the termination letters, Bulls said she relied on the template language provided by Riley to draft guidance to inform the 27 centers and institutes at the NIH what the agency’s new priorities were to help them scrutinize their own research portfolios.

Following the depositions, the Washington state attorney general’s office said that the federal government has refused to respond to its discovery requests. It has filed a motion to compel the government to respond, which is pending.

Riley, Bundesen, Bulls, and Memoli did not reply to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

While the administration did not answer ProPublica’s questions about DOGE and its involvement in the grant terminations, last week in its budget blueprint, it generally justified its proposed cuts at the NIH with claims that the agency had “wasteful spending,” conducted “risky research” and promoted “dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.”

“NIH has grown too big and unfocused,” the White House claimed in its fiscal plan, adding that the agency’s research should “align with the President’s priorities to address chronic disease and other epidemics, implementing all executive orders and eliminating research on climate change, radical gender ideology, and divisive racialism.”

Jeremy Berg, who led the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH from 2003 to 2011, told ProPublica that the administration’s assessment of the institution was “not fair and not based on any substantial analysis or evidence,” and the proposed cuts “would be absolutely devastating to NIH and to biomedical research in the United States.”

“It is profoundly distressing to see this great institution being reduced to a lawless, politicized organization without much focus on its actual mission,” he said.

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After two court losses, DOGE asks Supreme Court for Social Security data access

doge, Policy / 9u50fv / May 5, 2025

The Trump administration filed an emergency application on Friday asking the Supreme Court to restore DOGE’s access to Social Security Administration records. A lower-court order that prohibited DOGE’s access is causing “irreparable harm to the executive branch” and thwarting DOGE’s attempts to “eliminate waste and fraud,” US Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in the appeal.

“The government cannot eliminate waste and fraud if district courts bar the very agency personnel with expertise and the designated mission of curtailing such waste and fraud from performing their jobs,” Sauer told the Supreme Court. The preliminary injunction that is currently in place halted “the Executive Branch’s critically important efforts to improve its information-technology infrastructure and eliminate waste,” the brief said.

The appeal was lodged in a case filed by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the Alliance for Retired Americans; and American Federation of Teachers. Chief Justice John Roberts asked them to file a response to the US by May 12.

In March, the plaintiffs obtained an order that required the Social Security Administration (SSA) to block DOGE’s access to records. US District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander’s order said the DOGE entity created by President Donald Trump “is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion.”

Trump admin lost at appeals court

Hollander ordered the SSA to cut off DOGE’s access and ruled that Elon Musk and other DOGE members must “disgorge and delete all non-anonymized PII [personally identifiable information] data in their possession or under their control.” The District of Maryland judge found that Social Security officials “provided members of the SSA DOGE Team with unbridled access to the personal and private data of millions of Americans, including but not limited to Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, hospitalization records, drivers’ license numbers, bank and credit card information, tax information, income history, work history, birth and marriage certificates, and home and work addresses.”

After two court losses, DOGE asks Supreme Court for Social Security data access Read More »

A DOGE recruiter is staffing a project to deploy AI agents across the US government

AI, doge, palantir, Policy, syndication, us doge service / Mike M. / May 4, 2025

“does it still require Kremlin oversight?

A startup founder said that AI agents could do the work of tens of thousands of government employees.

An aide sets up a poster depicting the logo for the DOGE Caucus before a news conference in Washington, DC. Credit: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

A young entrepreneur who was among the earliest known recruiters for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has a new, related gig—and he’s hiring. Anthony Jancso, cofounder of AcclerateX, a government tech startup, is looking for technologists to work on a project that aims to have artificial intelligence perform tasks that are currently the responsibility of tens of thousands of federal workers.

Jancso, a former Palantir employee, wrote in a Slack with about 2000 Palantir alumni in it that he’s hiring for a “DOGE orthogonal project to design benchmarks and deploy AI agents across live workflows in federal agencies,” according to an April 21 post reviewed by WIRED. Agents are programs that can perform work autonomously.

We’ve identified over 300 roles with almost full-process standardization, freeing up at least 70k FTEs for higher-impact work over the next year,” he continued, essentially claiming that tens of thousands of federal employees could see many aspects of their job automated and replaced by these AI agents. Workers for the project, he wrote, would be based on site in Washington, DC, and would not require a security clearance; it isn’t clear for whom they would work. Palantir did not respond to requests for comment.

The post was not well received. Eight people reacted with clown face emojis, three reacted with a custom emoji of a man licking a boot, two reacted with custom emoji of Joaquin Phoenix giving a thumbs down in the movie Gladiator, and three reacted with a custom emoji with the word “Fascist.” Three responded with a heart emoji.

“DOGE does not seem interested in finding ‘higher impact work’ for federal employees,” one person said in a comment that received 11 heart reactions. “You’re complicit in firing 70k federal employees and replacing them with shitty autocorrect.”

“Tbf we’re all going to be replaced with shitty autocorrect (written by chatgpt),” another person commented, which received one “+1” reaction.

“How ‘DOGE orthogonal’ is it? Like, does it still require Kremlin oversight?” another person said in a comment that received five reactions with a fire emoji. “Or do they just use your credentials to log in later?”

AccelerateX was originally called AccelerateSF, which VentureBeat reported in 2023 had received support from OpenAI and Anthropic. In its earliest incarnation, AccelerateSF hosted a hackathon for AI developers aimed at using the technology to solve San Francisco’s social problems. According to a 2023 Mission Local story, for instance, Jancso proposed that using large language models to help businesses fill out permit forms to streamline the construction paperwork process might help drive down housing prices. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. Anthropic spokesperson Danielle Ghiglieri tells WIRED that the company “never invested in AccelerateX/SF,” but did sponsor a hackathon AccelerateSF hosted in 2023 by providing free access to its API usage at a time when its Claude API “was still in beta.”)

In 2024, the mission pivoted, with the venture becoming known as AccelerateX. In a post on X announcing the change, the company posted, “Outdated tech is dragging down the US Government. Legacy vendors sell broken systems at increasingly steep prices. This hurts every American citizen.” AccelerateX did not respond to a request for comment.

According to sources with direct knowledge, Jancso disclosed that AccelerateX had signed a partnership agreement with Palantir in 2024. According to the LinkedIn of someone described as one of AccelerateX’s cofounders, Rachel Yee, the company looks to have received funding from OpenAI’s Converge 2 Accelerator. Another of AccelerateSF’s cofounders, Kay Sorin, now works for OpenAI, having joined the company several months after that hackathon. Sorin and Yee did not respond to requests for comment.

Jancso’s cofounder, Jordan Wick, a former Waymo engineer, has been an active member of DOGE, appearing at several agencies over the past few months, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Education. In 2023, Jancso attended a hackathon hosted by ScaleAI; WIRED found that another DOGE member, Ethan Shaotran, also attended the same hackathon.

Since its creation in the first days of the second Trump administration, DOGE has pushed the use of AI across agencies, even as it has sought to cut tens of thousands of federal jobs. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, a DOGE associate suggested using AI to write code for the agency’s website; at the General Services Administration, DOGE has rolled out the GSAi chatbot; the group has sought to automate the process of firing government employees with a tool called AutoRIF; and a DOGE operative at the Department of Housing and Urban Development is using AI tools to examine and propose changes to regulations. But experts say that deploying AI agents to do the work of 70,000 people would be tricky if not impossible.

A federal employee with knowledge of government contracting, who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, says, “A lot of agencies have procedures that can differ widely based on their own rules and regulations, and so deploying AI agents across agencies at scale would likely be very difficult.”

Oren Etzioni, cofounder of the AI startup Vercept, says that while AI agents can be good at doing some things—like using an internet browser to conduct research—their outputs can still vary widely and be highly unreliable. For instance, customer service AI agents have invented nonexistent policies when trying to address user concerns. Even research, he says, requires a human to actually make sure what the AI is spitting out is correct.

“We want our government to be something that we can rely on, as opposed to something that is on the absolute bleeding edge,” says Etzioni. “We don’t need it to be bureaucratic and slow, but if corporations haven’t adopted this yet, is the government really where we want to be experimenting with the cutting edge AI?”

Etzioni says that AI agents are also not great 1-1 fits for job replacements. Rather, AI is able to do certain tasks or make others more efficient, but the idea that the technology could do the jobs of 70,000 employees would not be possible. “Unless you’re using funny math,” he says, “no way.”

Jancso, first identified by WIRED in February, was one of the earliest recruiters for DOGE in the months before Donald Trump was inaugurated. In December, Jancso, who sources told WIRED said he had been recruited by Steve Davis, president of the Musk-founded Boring Company and a current member of DOGE, used the Palantir alumni group to recruit DOGE members. On December 2nd, 2024, he wrote, “I’m helping Elon’s team find tech talent for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the new admin. This is a historic opportunity to build an efficient government, and to cut the federal budget by 1/3. If you’re interested in playing a role in this mission, please reach out in the next few days.”

According to one source at SpaceX, who asked to remain anonymous as they are not authorized to speak to the press, Jancso appeared to be one of the DOGE members who worked out of the company’s DC office in the days before inauguration along with several other people who would constitute some of DOGE’s earliest members. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

Palantir was cofounded by Peter Thiel, a billionaire and longtime Trump supporter with close ties to Musk. Palantir, which provides data analytics tools to several government agencies including the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security, has received billions of dollars in government contracts. During the second Trump administration, the company has been involved in helping to build a “mega API” to connect data from the Internal Revenue Service to other government agencies, and is working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to create a massive surveillance platform to identify immigrants to target for deportation.

This story originally appeared at WIRED.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

A DOGE recruiter is staffing a project to deploy AI agents across the US government Read More »

Car safety experts at NHTSA, which regulates Tesla, axed by DOGE

Cars, doge, elon musk, nhtsa, syndication, Tesla / DJ Henderson / April 10, 2025

Tesla has a lot riding on the swift success of its so-called Full Self-Driving software.

Credit: Kai Eckhardt/picture alliance via Getty Images

Job cuts at the US traffic safety regulator instigated by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency disproportionately hit staff assessing self-driving risks, hampering oversight of technology on which the world’s richest man has staked the future of Tesla.

Of roughly 30 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration workers dismissed in February as part of Musk’s campaign to shrink the federal workforce, many were in the “office of vehicle automation safety,” people familiar with the situation told the Financial Times.

The cuts are part of mass firings by Doge that have affected at least 20,000 federal employees and raised widespread concern over potential conflicts of interest for Musk given many of the targeted agencies regulate or have contracts with his businesses.

The NHTSA, which has been a thorn in Tesla’s side for years, has eight active investigations into the company after receiving—and publishing—more than 10,000 complaints from members of the public.

Morale at the agency, which has ordered dozens of Tesla recalls and delayed the rollout of the group’s self-driving and driver-assistance software, has plunged following Doge’s opening salvo of job cuts, according to current and former NHTSA staff.

“There is a clear conflict of interest in allowing someone with a business interest influence over appointments and policy at the agency regulating them,” said one former senior NHTSA figure, who was not among the Doge-led layoffs.

Remaining agency employees are now warily watching the experience of other federal regulators that have crossed Musk’s companies.

“Musk has attacked the Federal Aviation Administration and Federal Communications Commission to benefit SpaceX,” said another former top official at the regulator. “Why would he spare NHTSA?”

Musk has repeatedly clashed with federal and state authorities. Last year he called for the FAA chief to resign and sharply criticized the FCC for revoking a 2022 deal for his satellite telecommunications company Starlink to provide rural broadband.

The NHTSA said in a statement that safety remained its top priority and that it would enforce the law on any carmaker in line with its rules and investigations. “The agency’s investigations have been and will continue to be independent,” it added.

Musk, Doge, and Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The dismissals, instigated by email on Valentine’s Day, affected roughly 4 percent of the agency’s 800 staff and included employees who had been promised promotions as well as newly hired workers, according to seven people familiar with the matter.

Staff working on vehicle automation safety were disproportionately affected, some of the people said, because the division was only formed in 2023 so comprised many newer hires still on probation.

The email cited poor performance as a reason for the dismissals. However, one senior figure still at the NHTSA rejected the notion that this was the basis for the layoffs. Another said morale was low after “some huge talent losses.”

Doge’s actions could hamper Tesla’s plans, according to one laid-off agency worker, who said the dismissals would “certainly weaken NHTSA’s ability to understand self-driving technologies.”

“This is an office that should be on the cutting edge of how to handle AVs [autonomous vehicles] and figuring out what future rulemaking should look like,” said another former NHTSA employee. “It would be ironic if Doge slowed down Tesla.”

The company has a lot riding on the swift success of its so-called Full Self-Driving software.

Musk has promised customers and investors that Tesla will launch a driverless ride-hailing service in Austin, Texas, by June and start production of a fleet of autonomous “cybercabs” next year.

To do so, Tesla needs an exemption from the NHTSA to operate a non-standard driverless vehicle on American roads because Musk’s cybercabs have neither pedals nor a steering wheel.

“Letting Doge fire those in the autonomous division is sheer madness—we should be lobbying to add people to NHTSA,” said one manager at Tesla. They “need to be developing a national framework for AVs, otherwise Tesla doesn’t have a prayer for scale in FSD or robotaxis.”

The NHTSA’s decision on the cybercab exemption and the future of its proposed AV STEP program to evaluate and oversee driverless and assisted cars will be closely watched considering the high stakes for Tesla.

Current and former NHTSA officials have privately expressed concerns about Musk’s ambitious rollout plans and how he would wield his influence to ensure a speedy launch of the cybercab and unsupervised FSD on US roads.

The government could “speed up the [AV STEP] application process and weaken it in some way so the safety case is less onerous to meet,” one person told the FT.

The future of crash reporting is another area of concern for those at the agency, following reports that the Trump administration may seek to loosen or eliminate disclosure rules.

After a spate of incidents, the NHTSA in 2021 introduced a standing general order that requires carmakers to report within 24 hours any serious accidents involving vehicles equipped with advanced driver assistance or automated driving systems.

Enforcing the order has been a vital tool for the agency to launch investigations into Tesla and other carmakers because there is no federal regulatory framework to govern cars not under human control.

It was critical for a recall of 2 million Teslas in December 2023 for an update that would force drivers to pay attention when its autopilot assistance software was engaged.

“Crash reporting is vital, the massive Tesla recall on autopilot could not have occurred without it. We got a huge amount of info on crashes and followed up with demands for more data and video,” said one person involved in the recall. “But everything seems to be fair game right now.”

One person familiar with Musk’s thinking said the company felt unfairly penalized by the rules because its sensors and video recording are more advanced than rivals’ so it files more complete data.

“Reporters see that we are reporting more incidents—many of which have nothing to do with autopilot—and have told the wrong story about our safety record,” the person said. “There is a healthy amount of frustration about that dynamic… the idea our bar for safety is lower is just wrong.”

The NHTSA has shown no signs of backing down, overseeing three new recalls of Tesla vehicles since Trump took office, most recently ordering 46,000 Cybertrucks to be checked after discovering an exterior panel was prone to falling off because of faulty glue.

Of its eight active investigations into Tesla vehicles, five concern Musk’s claims about the capabilities of the company’s Autopilot driver-assistance system and its FSD software—central promises of Tesla’s value proposition and the subject of thousands of consumer complaints.

The agency has received an average of 20 per month on FSD since the software was launched, according to an FT analysis of more than 10,000 complaints.

A sharp rise in complaints about so-called “phantom braking” at the start of 2022 triggered one of the investigations. In one, about a mid-October 2024 incident, a Tesla Model 3 in FSD suddenly stopped in front of a car that would have crashed into it had the Tesla driver not taken back control of the vehicle and accelerated.

“Software is so far from being ready to be safely used,” the Model 3 driver said in the complaint.

While multiple Tesla tech updates in the past two years have reduced complaints about braking glitches, other software issues persist. The FT analysis, which used artificial intelligence to categorize complaints, shows errors connected to driver-assist tools such as FSD and Autopilot still make up a large share of complaints made against the company in the past year.

In February, the driver of a 2024 Cybertruck reported that FSD disengaged without warning, causing the vehicle to suddenly accelerate and nearly collide head-on with another car. The owner said they contacted Tesla service but the vehicle was neither inspected nor repaired.

Former Apple executive Jonathan Morrison has been nominated by Trump as the NHTSA’s next administrator and must find a way to navigate the agency through the perceived conflicts of interest with Musk, without being accused of stifling AV innovation.

“Elon has done a lot of really interesting things with tech that were thought to be impossible,” said one former top NHTSA official.

“What concerns me is that Tesla is not known for taking a slow and methodical approach; they move fast and break things, and people are at risk because of that. There have been preventable deaths, so it’s an immediate concern for us.”

Car safety experts at NHTSA, which regulates Tesla, axed by DOGE Read More »

Victory for DOGE as appeals court reinstates access to personal data

doge, Policy / Beth Washington / April 9, 2025

A US appeals court ruled yesterday that DOGE can access personal data held by the US Department of Education and Office of Personnel Management (OPM), overturning an order issued by a lower-court judge.

The US government has “met its burden of a strong showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits of their appeal,” said yesterday’s ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. In a 2-1 decision, a panel of judges granted the Trump administration’s motion to stay the lower-court ruling pending appeal.

“The Supreme Court has told us that, unlike a private party, the government suffers an irreparable harm when it cannot carry out the orders of its elected representatives… Judicial management of agency operations offends the Executive Branch’s exclusive authority to enforce federal law,” wrote Court of Appeals Judge Steven Agee, a George W. Bush appointee.

Agee was joined by Judge Julius Richardson, a Trump appointee, in voting to grant the motion to stay pending appeal. Judge Robert King, a Clinton appointee, voted to deny the motion.

Judge “strongly” dissents

In a separate 8-7 vote, the full court denied King’s request for an en banc hearing. King’s dissent said:

Given the exceptional importance of this matter, I sought initial en banc consideration of the government’s motion for a stay pending appeal of the district court’s award of preliminary injunctive relief—an injunction that bars the defendant federal agencies and officials from disclosing to affiliates of the President’s new Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE,” highly sensitive personal information belonging to millions of Americans. Regrettably, my request for initial hearing en banc has been denied on an 8-7 vote, and the panel majority has granted the government’s motion for a stay pending appeal on a 2-1 vote. I strongly dissent from both decisions.

At stake is some of the most sensitive personal information imaginable—including Social Security numbers, income and assets, federal tax records, disciplinary and other personnel actions, physical and mental health histories, driver’s license information, bank account numbers, and demographic and family details. This information was entrusted to the government, which for many decades had a record of largely adhering to the Privacy Act of 1974 and keeping the information safe. And then suddenly, the defendants began disclosing the information to DOGE affiliates without substantiating that they have any need to access such highly sensitive materials.

Yesterday’s decision overturned a ruling by US District Judge Deborah Boardman in the District of Maryland. Plaintiffs include the American Federation of Teachers; the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers; the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association; the National Federation of Federal Employees; and the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers. There are also six individual plaintiffs who are military veterans.

Victory for DOGE as appeals court reinstates access to personal data Read More »

DOGE gearing up for hackathon at IRS, wants easier access to taxpayer data

doge, IRS, Policy, syndication / Shannon Garcia / April 7, 2025

DOGE has already slashed and burned modernization projects at other agencies, replacing them with smaller teams and tighter timelines. At the Social Security Administration, DOGE representatives are planning to move all of the agency’s data off of legacy programming languages like COBOL and into something like Java, WIRED reported last week.

Last Friday, DOGE suddenly placed around 50 IRS technologists on administrative leave. On Thursday, even more technologists were cut, including the director of cybersecurity architecture and implementation, deputy chief information security officer, and acting director of security risk management. IRS’s chief technology officer, Kaschit Pandya, is one of the few technology officials left at the agency, sources say.

DOGE originally expected the API project to take a year, multiple IRS sources say, but that timeline has shortened dramatically down to a few weeks. “That is not only not technically possible, that’s also not a reasonable idea, that will cripple the IRS,” an IRS employee source tells WIRED. “It will also potentially endanger filing season next year, because obviously all these other systems they’re pulling people away from are important.”

(Corcos also made it clear to IRS employees that he wanted to kill the agency’s Direct File program, the IRS’s recently released free tax-filing service.)

DOGE’s focus on obtaining and moving sensitive IRS data to a central viewing platform has spooked privacy and civil liberties experts.

“It’s hard to imagine more sensitive data than the financial information the IRS holds,” Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a digital civil rights organization, tells WIRED.

Palantir received the highest FedRAMP approval this past December for its entire product suite, including Palantir Federal Cloud Service (PFCS), which provides a cloud environment for federal agencies to implement the company’s software platforms, like Gotham and Foundry. FedRAMP stands for Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program and assesses cloud products for security risks before governmental use.

“We love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a February earnings call. “Disruption at the end of the day exposes things that aren’t working. There will be ups and downs. This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

DOGE gearing up for hackathon at IRS, wants easier access to taxpayer data Read More »

What could possibly go wrong? DOGE to rapidly rebuild Social Security codebase.

Biz & IT, cobol, doge, elon musk, Java, Policy, syndication / Shannon Garcia / March 30, 2025

Like many legacy government IT systems, SSA systems contain code written in COBOL, a programming language created in part in the 1950s by computing pioneer Grace Hopper. The Defense Department essentially pressured private industry to use COBOL soon after its creation, spurring widespread adoption and making it one of the most widely used languages for mainframes, or computer systems that process and store large amounts of data quickly, by the 1970s. (At least one DOD-related website praising Hopper’s accomplishments is no longer active, likely following the Trump administration’s DEI purge of military acknowledgements.)

As recently as 2016, SSA’s infrastructure contained more than 60 million lines of code written in COBOL, with millions more written in other legacy coding languages, the agency’s Office of the Inspector General found. In fact, SSA’s core programmatic systems and architecture haven’t been “substantially” updated since the 1980s when the agency developed its own database system called MADAM, or the Master Data Access Method, which was written in COBOL and Assembler, according to SSA’s 2017 modernization plan.

SSA’s core “logic” is also written largely in COBOL. This is the code that issues social security numbers, manages payments, and even calculates the total amount beneficiaries should receive for different services, a former senior SSA technologist who worked in the office of the chief information officer says. Even minor changes could result in cascading failures across programs.

“If you weren’t worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead,” says Dan Hon, principal of Very Little Gravitas, a technology strategy consultancy that helps government modernize services, about completing such a migration in a short timeframe.

It’s unclear when exactly the code migration would start. A recent document circulated amongst SSA staff laying out the agency’s priorities through May does not mention it, instead naming other priorities like terminating “non-essential contracts” and adopting artificial intelligence to “augment” administrative and technical writing.

What could possibly go wrong? DOGE to rapidly rebuild Social Security codebase. Read More »

Judge orders Musk and DOGE to delete personal data taken from Social Security

doge, elon musk, Policy, Trump / 9u50fv / March 22, 2025

The lawsuit was filed by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the Alliance for Retired Americans; and American Federation of Teachers. “Never before has a group of unelected, unappointed, and unvetted individuals—contradictorily described as White House employees, employees of either existing or putative agencies (multiple and many), and undefined ‘advisors’—sought or gained access to such sensitive information from across the federal government,” the lawsuit said.

A temporary restraining order preserves the status quo until a preliminary injunction hearing can be held, although the legal standards for granting a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction are essentially the same, Hollander wrote. A temporary restraining order lasts 14 days by default but can be extended.

“In my view, plaintiffs have shown a likelihood of success on the merits as to their claim that the access to records provided by SSA to the DOGE Team does not fall within the need-to-know exception to the Privacy Act. Therefore, the access violates both the Privacy Act and the APA,” Hollander wrote.

The SSA has meanwhile been hit with DOGE-fueled budget cuts affecting its operations.

The order

The order says the SSA must cut off DOGE’s access. Musk, Gleason, and all other DOGE team members and affiliates “shall disgorge and delete all non-anonymized PII [personally identifiable information] data in their possession or under their control, provided from or obtained, directly or indirectly, from any SSA system of record to which they have or have had access, directly or indirectly, since January 20, 2025,” it says.

The DOGE defendants are also prohibited “from installing any software on SSA devices, information systems, or systems of record, and shall remove any software that they previously installed since January 20, 2025, or which has been installed on their behalf,” and are prohibited “from accessing, altering, or disclosing any SSA computer or software code.”

The SSA is allowed to provide DOGE with redacted or anonymized records, and may provide “access to discrete, particularized, and non-anonymized data, in accordance with the Privacy Act” under certain conditions. “SSA must first obtain from the DOGE Team member, in writing, and subject to possible review by the Court, a detailed explanation as to the need for the record and why, for said particular and discrete record, an anonymized or redacted record is not suitable for the specified use,” the order said. “The general and conclusory explanation that the information is needed to search for fraud or waste is not sufficient to establish need.”

Judge orders Musk and DOGE to delete personal data taken from Social Security Read More »

US tries to keep DOGE and Musk work secret in appeal of court-ordered discovery

doge, musk trump, Policy, President Donald Trump, us doge service / Shannon Garcia / March 20, 2025

The petition argues that discovery is unnecessary to assess the plaintiff states’ claims. “Plaintiffs allege a violation of the Appointments Clause and USDS’s statutory authority on the theory that USDS and Mr. Musk are directing decision-making by agency officeholders,” it said. “Those claims present pure questions of law that can be resolved—and rejected—on the basis of plaintiffs’ complaint. In particular, precedent establishes that the Appointments Clause turns on proper appointment of officeholders; it is not concerned with the de facto influence over those who hold office.”

States: Discovery can confirm Musk’s role at DOGE

The states’ lawsuit alleged that “President Trump has delegated virtually unchecked authority to Mr. Musk without proper legal authorization from Congress and without meaningful supervision of his activities. As a result, he has transformed a minor position that was formerly responsible for managing government websites into a designated agent of chaos without limitation and in violation of the separation of powers.”

States argued that discovery “may confirm what investigative reporting has already indicated: Defendants Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (‘DOGE’) are directing actions within federal agencies that have profoundly harmed the States and will continue to harm them.”

Amy Gleason, the person the White House claims is running DOGE instead of Musk, has reportedly been working simultaneously at the Department of Health and Human Services since last month.

“Defendants assert that Mr. Musk is merely an advisor to the President, with no authority to direct agency action and no role at DOGE,” the states’ filing said. “The public record refutes that implausible assertion. But only Defendants possess the documents and information that Plaintiffs need to confirm public reporting and identify which agencies Defendants will target next so Plaintiffs can seek preliminary relief and mitigate further harm.”

“Notably, Plaintiffs seek no emails, text messages, or other electronic communications at this stage, meaning Defendants will not need to sort through such exchanges for relevance or possible privilege,” the states said. “The documents that Plaintiffs do seek—planning, implementation, and organizational documents—are readily available to Defendants and do not implicate the same privilege concerns.”

Discovery related to DOGE and Musk’s conduct

Chutkan wrote that the plaintiffs’ “document requests and interrogatories generally concern DOGE’s and Musk’s conduct in four areas: (1) eliminating or reducing the size of federal agencies; (2) terminating or placing federal employees on leave; (3) cancelling, freezing, or pausing federal contracts, grants, or other federal funding; and (4) obtaining access, using, or making changes to federal databases or data management systems.”

US tries to keep DOGE and Musk work secret in appeal of court-ordered discovery Read More »

China aims to recruit top US scientists as Trump tries to kill the CHIPS Act

Chips Act, department of government efficiency, doge, Donald Trump, intel, Micron, NSF, NVIDIA, Policy, samsung, semiconductors, TSMC / Kelly Newman / March 6, 2025

Tech innovation in US likely to stall if Trump ends the CHIPS Act.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump finally made it clear to Congress that he wants to kill the CHIPS and Science Act—a $280 billion bipartisan law Joe Biden signed in 2022 to bring more semiconductor manufacturing into the US and put the country at the forefront of research and innovation.

Trump has long expressed frustration with the high cost of the CHIPS Act, telling Congress on Tuesday that it’s a “horrible, horrible thing” to “give hundreds of billions of dollars” in subsidies to companies that he claimed “take our money” and “don’t spend it,” Reuters reported.

“You should get rid of the CHIPS Act, and whatever is left over, Mr. Speaker, you should use it to reduce debt,” Trump said.

Instead, Trump potentially plans to shift the US from incentivizing chips manufacturing to punishing firms dependent on imports, threatening a 25 percent tariff on all semiconductor imports that could kick in as soon as April 2, CNBC reported.

The CHIPS Act was supposed to be Biden’s legacy, and because he made it a priority, much of the $52.7 billion in subsidies that Trump is criticizing has already been finalized. In 2022, Biden approved $39 billion in subsidies for semiconductor firms, and in his last weeks in office, he finalized more than $33 billion in awards, Reuters noted.

Among the awardees are leading semiconductor firms, including the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), Micron, Intel, Nvidia, and Samsung Electronics. Although Trump claims the CHIPS Act is one-sided and only serves to benefit firms, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, the law sparked $450 billion in private investments increasing semiconductor production across 28 states by mid-2024.

With the CHIPS Act officially in Trump’s crosshairs, innovation appears likely to stall the longer that lawmakers remain unsettled on whether the law stays or goes. Some officials worried that Trump might interfere with Biden’s binding agreements with leading firms already holding up their end of the bargain, Reuters reported. For example, Micron plans to invest $100 billion in New York, and TSMC just committed to spending the same over the next four years to expand construction of US chips fabs, which is already well underway.

So far, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has only indicated that he will review the finalized awards, noting that the US wouldn’t be giving TSMC any new awards, Reuters reported.

But the CHIPS Act does much more than provide subsidies to lure leading semiconductor companies into the US. For the first time in decades, the law created a new arm of the National Science Foundation (NSF)—the Directorate of Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP)—which functions unlike any other part of NSF and now appears existentially threatened.

Designed to take the country’s boldest ideas from basic research to real-world applications as fast as possible to make the US as competitive as possible, TIP helps advance all NSF research and was supposed to ensure US leadership in breakthrough technologies, including AI, 6G communications, biotech, quantum computing, and advanced manufacturing.

Biden allocated $20 billion to launch TIP through the CHIPS Act to accelerate technology development not just at top firms but also in small research settings across the US. But as soon as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) started making cuts at NSF this year, TIP got hit the hardest. Seemingly TIP was targeted not because DOGE deemed it the least consequential but simply because it was the youngest directorate at NSF with the most workers in transition when Trump took office and DOGE abruptly announced it was terminating all “probationary” federal workers.

It took years to get TIP ready to flip the switch to accelerate tech innovation in the US. Without it, Trump risks setting the US back at a time when competitors like China are racing ahead and wooing US scientists who suddenly may not know if or when their funding is coming, NSF workers and industry groups told Ars.

Without TIP, NSF slows down

Last month, DOGE absolutely scrambled the NSF by forcing arbitrary cuts of so-called probationary employees—mostly young scientists, some of whom were in transition due to promotions. All those cuts were deemed illegal and finally reversed Monday by court order after weeks of internal chaos reportedly stalling or threatening to delay some of the highest-priority research in the US.

“The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees at another agency,” US District Judge William Alsup said, calling probationary employees the “life blood” of government agencies.

Ars granted NSF workers anonymity to discuss how cuts were impacting research. At TIP, a federal worker told Ars that one of the probationary cuts in particular threatened to do the most damage.

Because TIP is so new, only one worker was trained to code automated tracking forms that helped decision-makers balance budgets and approve funding for projects across NSF in real time. Ars’ source likened it to holding the only key to the vault of NSF funding. And because TIP is so different from other NSF branches—hiring experts never pulled into NSF before and requiring customized resources to coordinate projects across all NSF fields of research—the insider suggested another government worker couldn’t easily be substituted. It could take possibly two years to hire and train a replacement on TIP’s unique tracking system, the source said, while TIP’s (and possibly all of NSF’s) efficiency is likely strained.

TIP has never been fully functional, the TIP insider confirmed, and could be choked off right as it starts helping to move the needle on US innovation. “Imagine where we are in two years and where China is in two years in quantum computing, semiconductors, or AI,” the TIP insider warned, pointing to China’s surprisingly advanced AI model, DeepSeek, as an indicator of how quickly tech leadership in global markets can change.

On Monday, NSF emailed all workers to confirm that all probationary workers would be reinstated “right away.” But the damage may already be done as it’s unclear how many workers plan to return. When TIP lost the coder—who was seemingly fired for a technicality while transitioning to a different payscale—NSF workers rushed to recommend the coder on LinkedIn, hoping to help the coder quickly secure another opportunity in industry or academia.

Ars could not reach the coder to confirm whether a return to TIP is in the cards. But Ars’ source at TIP and another NSF worker granted anonymity said that probationary workers may be hesitant to return because they are likely to be hit in any official reductions in force (RIFs) in the future.

“RIFs done the legal way are likely coming down the pipe, so these staff are not coming back to a place of security,” the NSF worker said. “The trust is broken. Even for those that choose to return, they’d be wise to be seeking other opportunities.”

And even losing the TIP coder for a couple of weeks likely slows NSF down at a time when the US seemingly can’t afford to lose a single day.

“We’re going to get murdered” if China sets the standard on 6G or AI, the TIP worker fears.

Rivals and allies wooing top US scientists

On Monday, six research and scientific associations, which described themselves as “leading organizations representing more than 305,000 people in computing, information technology, and technical innovation across US industry, academia, and government,” wrote to Congress demanding protections for the US research enterprise.

The groups warned that funding freezes and worker cuts at NSF—and other agencies, including the Department of Energy, the National Institute of Standards & Technology, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Institutes of Health—”have caused disruption and uncertainty” and threaten “long-lasting negative consequences for our competitiveness, national security, and economic prosperity.”

Deeming America’s technology leadership at risk, the groups pointed out that “in computing alone, a federal investment in research of just over $10 billion annually across 24 agencies and offices underpins a technology sector that contributes more than $2 trillion to the US GDP each year.” Cutting US investment “would be a costly mistake, far outweighing any short-term savings,” the groups warned.

In a separate statement, the Computing Research Association (CRA) called NSF cuts, in particular, a “deeply troubling, self-inflicted setback to US leadership in computing research” that appeared “penny-wise and pound-foolish.”

“NSF is one of the most efficient federal agencies, operating with less than 9 percent overhead costs,” CRA said. “These arbitrary terminations are not justified by performance metrics or efficiency concerns; rather, they represent a drastic and unnecessary weakening of the US research enterprise.”

Many NSF workers are afraid to speak up, the TIP worker told Ars, and industry seems similarly tight-lipped as confusion remains. Only one of the organizations urging Congress to intervene agreed to talk to Ars about the NSF cuts and the significance of TIP. Kathryn Kelley, the executive director of the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation, confirmed that while members are more aligned with NSF’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering and the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, her group agrees that all NSF cuts are “deeply” concerning.

“We agree that the uncertainty and erosion of trust within the NSF workforce could have long-lasting effects on the agency’s ability to attract and retain top talent, particularly in such specialized areas,” Kelley told Ars. “This situation underscores the need for continued investment in a stable, well-supported workforce to maintain the US’s leadership in science and innovation.”

Other industry sources unwilling to go on the record told Ars that arbitrary cuts largely affecting the youngest scientists at NSF threatened to disrupt a generation of researchers who envisioned long careers advancing US tech. There’s now a danger that those researchers may be lured to other countries heavily investing in science and currently advertising to attract displaced US researchers, including not just rivals like China but also allies like Denmark.

Those sources questioned the wisdom of using the Elon Musk-like approach of breaking the NSF to rebuild it when it’s already one of the leanest organizations in government.

Ars confirmed that some PhD programs have been cancelled, as many academic researchers are already widely concerned about delayed or cancelled grants and generally freaked out about where to get dependable funding outside the NSF. And in industry, some CHIPS Act projects have already been delayed, as companies like Intel try to manage timelines without knowing what’s happening with CHIPS funding, AP News reported.

“Obviously chip manufacturing companies will slow spending on programs they previously thought they were getting CHIPS Act funding for if not cancel those projects outright,” the Semiconductor Advisors, an industry group, forecasted in a statement last month.

The TIP insider told Ars that the CHIPS Act subsidies for large companies that Trump despises mostly fuel manufacturing in the US, while funding for smaller research facilities is what actually advances technology. Reducing efficiency at TIP would likely disrupt those researchers the most, the TIP worker suggested, proclaiming that’s why TIP must be saved at all costs.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

China aims to recruit top US scientists as Trump tries to kill the CHIPS Act Read More »