Can AI help DOGE slash government budgets? It's complex.

The stated goal of DOGE's actions, per a statement from a White House spokesperson to the New York Times on Thursday, is "slashing waste, fraud, and abuse." As I point out in my story published Friday, these three terms mean very different things in the world of federal budgets, from errors the government makes when spending money to nebulous spending that's legal and approved but disliked by someone in power. Many of the new administration's loudest and most sweeping actions--like Musk's promise to end the entirety of USAID's varied activities or Trump's severe cuts to scientific funding from the National Institutes of Health--might be said to target the latter category. If DOGE feeds government data to large language models, it might easily find spending associated with DEI or other initiatives the administration considers wasteful as it pushes for 2 trillion in cuts, nearly a third of the federal budget. But the fact that DOGE aides are reportedly working in the offices of Medicaid and even Medicare--where budget cuts have been politically untenable for decades--suggests the task force is also driven by evidence published by the Government Accountability Office.