“United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation.”—President Donald Trump, Executive Order 14365
The era of small government is over.
Anyone who tells you differently is selling you a lie.
Case in point: Donald Trump promised to shrink the federal government.
But what if Trump’s pledge to cut the federal work force wasn’t really about eliminating government bureaucracy but outsourcing it to the AI tech sector?
What if Trump, with the backing of a self-serving industry eager to automate government, is instead helping to build a government that no longer needs as many human beings to operate it?
Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are disappearing from the government payroll at the same time that Washington is racing to automate the work they once performed with artificial intelligence.
Since Trump returned to office, the federal workforce has shrunk by more than 270,000 employees, the result of hiring freezes, deferred resignations, early retirements and reductions in force.
At the same time, the Trump administration has embraced an aggressive campaign to automate government operations, with the General Services Administration instructing agencies to “eliminate, optimize and automate“ their work wherever possible.
This is not a return to smaller government.
It is a dangerous recalibration of government power.
What we are watching unfold is the construction of a government that requires fewer human beings to carry out its will, fewer human beings to question its orders, and fewer human beings to stand in the way when efficiency collides with legality, morality or constitutional restraint.
That is the real danger of automating government.
Human beings hesitate. Human beings question. Human beings object. Human beings refuse. Human beings blow the whistle.
Machines do not hesitate. They do not object. They do not blow the whistle.
For the most part, machines do what they are programmed to do. Until they don’t.
