The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Musk, is working to reduce and reorganize the U.S. civil service, and this effort has entered a new phase. The concept is simple: use generative artificial intelligence to automate work previously done by people. DOGE recently deployed a government chatbot called GSAi within the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), covering 1,500 federal employees. This AI tool is designed to take over “routine” tasks previously completed by humans, and this move comes at a time when DOGE is accelerating the reduction of federal employees, sparking widespread speculation about the connection between AI and layoffs.
The U.S. government is testing this new chatbot with 1,500 federal employees of the GSA, which means that more than 10,000 staff responsible for more than $100 billion in contracts and services can use this robot. The chatbot is seen by GSA leadership as a tool to improve the productivity of federal workers and is part of a larger action plan by the Department of Government Efficiency and its allies. Speaking of GSA’s overall plan, Thomas Scheider, a former Tesla engineer who was recently appointed director of the Technology Transformation Services Bureau, GSA’s information technology department, said at a staff meeting last month that the agency is advancing an “AI-first strategy.”
GSAi’s Actual Capabilities Need to be Improved
GSAi’s functional positioning is similar to commercial AI tools such as ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, but it has been customized to meet the security standards for government use. This chatbot mainly handles daily administrative tasks such as drafting emails, organizing speaking points, summarizing texts and even writing code. The DOGE team also plans to use GSAi to analyze contract and procurement data in the future to further improve efficiency.
GSAi’s operating interface is similar to ChatGPT, with the default model being Claude Haiku 3.5. Users can also switch to Claude Sonnet 3.5 v2 or Meta LLaMa 3.2 according to task requirements. An internal memo reads: “The uses of AI chat are endless, and it will continue to improve as new information is added.” However, the memo also clearly warns: It is strictly forbidden to enter federal non-public information (such as internal emails, work results, photos, videos, etc.) and personal identification information, and even “controlled non-confidential information” is not allowed to be uploaded.
An employee who has used GSAi commented that it was about the same level as an intern, with general and predictable answers. This may imply that although GSAi has been put into use, its actual capabilities still need to be polished and it cannot really replace experienced government civil servants.
DOGE’s AI Ambitions
In February this year, GSAi launched a pilot among 150 employees, and then the deployment speed was greatly accelerated under the promotion of DOGE’s newly appointed agency leaders. DOGE’s goal is to promote GSAi to the entire GSA. Previously, this chatbot had been developed for several months, but the intervention of the new leadership brought it from behind the scenes to the front.
However, the promotion of GSAi has not been smooth sailing. In February, GSA worked with the Department of Education to provide the latter with a supportive chatbot, led by DOGE member Ethan Shaotran. GSA engineers discussed creating a public “endpoint” for Department of Education officials to access an early version of GSAi in internal messages, but one employee bluntly said the system was “ridiculously crude.”
The Plan Behind the AI Assistant
DOGE’s actions are not limited to the promotion of GSAi, but are also accompanied by large-scale layoffs. Thomas Shedd, head of GSA Technology Transformation Services (TTS) and a former Tesla engineer, announced at a staff meeting that TTS will lay off 50% of its employees in the coming weeks, and about 90 technicians were fired last week. Shedd plans to focus the remaining employees on public-facing projects, and the rest of the non-mandatory work may be cut. “We will build a high-performance team that focuses on results,” Shedd said at the meeting. As early as early February, he made it clear that he would make AI and automation the core agenda of TTS.
Musk’s goal of GSAi is by no means limited to replacing some civil servants in the GSA department. The U.S. Treasury Department and the Department of Health and Human Services are also considering introducing GSA chatbots for internal management and external contact centers (it is not clear whether it is GSAi). In addition, the U.S. Army has enabled the generative AI tool CamoGPT to remove DEI content from training materials. These signs indicate that AI tools are infiltrating the entire U.S. federal agency in different forms.
However, the rapid application of AI has also caused controversy. Although the regulations restricting the input of sensitive information are for security reasons, they may weaken the practicality of GSAi. After all, who would expect an AI that cannot process internal data to significantly improve efficiency. More importantly, whether DOGE’s “AI replacement” strategy will become a legal tool for federal layoffs remains unknown.
