The US government shut down 30 days ago. WIRED spoke with more than a dozen federal workers who have struggled to pay bills, worked side gigs, and relied on free food programs to get by. In late September, a federal worker based abroad learned that her husband, who is also a federal worker and a military veteran, had "high risk, very aggressive cancer." Doctors told the couple that the cancer needed to be removed immediately or it would no longer be treatable. Her husband is covered by TRICARE, the health care program offered to members of the military and veterans.

"People are scared, says one federal worker. "Is WIRED hiring?" jokes another. Federal workers have grown accustomed to a specific kind of dread over the past year . As of July, more than 150,000 federal workers had resigned from their roles since president Donald Trump took office for the second time, according to . Tens of thousands were also fired. For the past few months, it seemed like this bloodletting was over--but that all changed on Friday. Thousands of employees at eight government agencies were subjected to RIFs, or reductions in force--the government's formal process of laying off federal workers. According to a court filing from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Friday, this latest round of firings has affected more than 4,000 federal employees. The court filing also claimed that the administration targeted the Treasury and the Department of Health and Human Services the hardest, hacking away at a combined 2,500 jobs across the two agencies and the entire Washington, DC, office of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . The Department of Education culled nearly its entire team handling special education, CNN reported on Tuesday . At the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, cuts ranged from a few dozen to several hundred jobs, according to the same filing. Who says their goal is to traumatize people?" says one IRS worker, referencing private speeches given by Russell Vought, the head of OMB and a key architect of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 who has been the public face of the job-cutting.

Federal employees say that flying is still safe despite the strain on air traffic controllers. But expect even more airport delays ahead. It hasn't been a good year for federal aviation safety workers. January saw the worst US commercial airline disaster in decades, quickly followed by sudden layoffs, staffing shortfalls, major technology glitches at one of the nation's busiest airports, and short timelines to rebuild the systems that govern national airspace. It somehow got worse this month, when a stalemate between congressional Republicans and Democrats led to a government shutdown.

OpenAI is partnering with the US government to make its leading frontier models available to federal employees. Under the agreement, federal agencies can access OpenAI's models for 1 for the next year, per a Wednesday announcement from the company and the General Services Administration (GSA). The partnership is the culmination of months of effort on the part of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other OpenAI executives, who have been cozying up to the Trump administration since before President Donald Trump retook the White House in January. Since at least May of this year, high-ranking OpenAI employees have been meeting with the GSA and other government agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration, to promote the company's tools, according to documents obtained by WIRED. On July 23, OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap and other OpenAI executives were invited to a private after-party hosted by the Hill and Valley Forum in Washington, DC.

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.

At the Department of Veterans Affairs, a senior official warned employees in an email that virtual meetings were being secretly recorded. Anyone dissatisfied with Donald Trump's decisions should be careful about voicing their opinions, the official cautioned. Over at the state department, IT staff said new monitoring software has been loaded onto computers. Some staffers have started using white noise machines in their offices, or have even turned on an office breakroom sink, to muffle conversations in case there might be any hot mics within range. A supervisor at one water management organization that works closely with the Environmental Protection Agency sent a warning to staffers that their meetings and phone calls with the agency were being monitored by an artificial intelligence tool.

If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Matteo Wong on Signal at @matteowong.52. A new phase of the president and the Department of Government Efficiency's attempts to downsize and remake the civil service is under way. The idea is simple: use generative AI to automate work that was previously done by people. The Trump administration is testing a new chatbot with 1,500 federal employees at the General Services Administration and may release it to the entire agency as soon as this Friday--meaning it could be used by more than 10,000 workers who are responsible for more than 100 billion in contracts and services. This article is based in part on conversations with several current and former GSA employees with knowledge of the technology, all of whom requested anonymity to speak about confidential information; it is also based on internal GSA documents that I reviewed, as well as the software's code base, which is visible on GitHub.

Katie Drummond: And we obviously know you well on this show because you cohost our Thursday episodes with Mike and Lauren. Katie Drummond: And let's get right into it. So Zoë, two weeks ago on February 20th, you published a story on WIRED.com about a 1 spending limit being placed on government employee credit cards. Walk us through that first story. You've subsequently published more reporting on that topic this week, but tell us sort of where this came from at the outset.

When a phalanx of the top Silicon Valley executives--Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Google's Sundar Pichai--aligned behind President Trump during the Inauguration in January, many observers saw an allegiance based on corporate interests. The ultra-wealthy C.E.O.s were turning out to support a fellow-magnate, hoping perhaps for an era of deregulation, tax breaks, and anti-"woke" cultural shifts. The historian Janis Mimura saw something more ominous: a new, proactive union of industry and governmental power, wherein the state would drive aggressive industrial policy at the expense of liberal norms. In the second Trump Administration, a class of Silicon Valley leaders was insinuating itself into politics in a way that recalled one of Mimura's primary subjects of study: the élite bureaucrats who seized political power and drove Japan into the Second World War. "These are experts with a technological mind-set and background, often engineers, who now have a special role in the government," Mimura told me.

Not long ago, the American public could have been forgiven for thinking of Elon Musk's vaunted Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as a version of a familiar Republican cost-cutting, government-shrinking project. The man who took over Twitter and slashed its staff by around eighty per cent would take a similarly aggressive tack against bureaucratic inefficiency, reining in budgets and laying off federal employees. In the past couple of weeks, though, it's become clear that Musk's aim within the Trump Administration goes further: he wants not only to reduce the U.S. government but to install his own technological vision of the future at its heart. To run his agency, Musk brought on a group of tech-company managers and inexperienced twentysomethings whose credentials included internships at SpaceX. We watched as this crew began interrogating federal employees about their jobs, interfering with the system that controls payments at the Treasury Department, and trawling government budgets while Musk used X, the social platform he owns, to call out the agencies and programs in his crosshairs.