The US government is now running on AI autopilot
Marco van Hurne
AI & ML advisory | Author of The Machine Learning Book of Knowledge | Building AI skills & organizations | Data Science | Data Governance | AI Compliance Officer | AI Governance
If you haven’t heard of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, you better crawl straight back under the rock you came from. DOGE, because of course it’s called that. Do you know who was called DOGE before Elon claimed it?
Maybe the Renaissance buffs can recall it.
The Doge in the Reneissance (yes, with capital R) was an actual political title. Doge comes from the Latin dux, which means “leader” or “duke”. The Doge was the elected ruler of Venice and Genoa. Those were two of the richest and most powerful maritime republics of the time. Kinda like our current DOGE, the man was elected for life, but don’t be fooled. The peeps in Venice were so paranoid about tyranny that the Doge was surrounded by councils, advisors and rules that were so darn strict that he couldn’t even open a diplomatic letter without witnesses.
But unline Skum’s DOGE, aka “fire everyone, and let AI sort it out”, the Renaissance Doge was a carefully chosen person. Venice at the time, was basically the Silicon Valley of the Mediterranean, except instead of overhyped AI models and stock manipulations, they controlled global trade, banking and a freaking mercenary fleet that would show up and wreck your little kingdom if you missed a payment.
So, sorry, Elon. If you want to compare Renaissance Venice’s Doge to your modern acronym, nice try bruv, but no. The Renaissance guy had actual oversight. And you, with your gang of kids are more like a rampaging medieval noble who is immediately firing the entire court, and replacing them with a chatbot that says “” I am a humble servant of efficiency, now let me hallucinate some kinglike policies for you” (more like "I am but a lowly thrall to ye art of efficiency, now suffer me to conjure forth some kingly decrees most wondrous and false for thee”, but who cares)
Anyway, the DOGE in our timeline has officially given up on humans.
Real, thinking, experienced people?
Overrated.
The plan?
Fire them all and roll out a chatbot to fill the void. The US General Services Administration (GSA, hence the name GSAi, nudge nudge), which is the agency responsible for managing federal buildings, contracts, and more paperwork than any sane person should ever have to read, has been gifted a shiny new AI assistant, GSAi.
Yes. Lower case i.
Because intelligence is but a distant dream with GSAi
Thousands of actual living and breathing workers, people like domain experts, civil servants, the people who actually understand how to keep a government from collapsing, are out. And in their place comes an AI that is so rushed, so hilariously undercooked, that even interns DOGE’s staff are rolling their eyes (behind the man’s back of course).
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YOUR NEW, INCOMPETENT OVERLORD
So, the government fired thousands of experts and replaced them with a chatbot.
Bold strategy.
You know who else is also betting heavily on chatbots?
Elon Musk.
What a coincidence?
The same guy who built Grok, which is an AI that is so brutally self-aware that when asked, "If Satan were to manifest on Earth, who would it be?" it named Musk himself. The chatbot he owns just outed him as the digital Antichrist, and yet, we are supposed to trust his grand vision for artificial intelligence in . . . . government?
Yes, the man who wants to automate everything now has his digital fingerprints all over GSAi, which is a chatbot that apparently escaped beta testing by accident. Employees were already calling it janky, before DOGE even stepped in, which is polite government speak for utterly useless. The AI is designed to help civil servants, yet not replace them wholesale. But then Musk and his crew showed up, took one look at the project, and said, “Ship it. Fire everyone. Trust the bot.”
Yes, the same guy who rolled out an AI that can barely function but is somehow still smart enough to roast him publicly.
Musk, in his infinite wisdom, announced that Grok 2.0 would be trained directly on X posts. That is a strategy which is so hilariously bad that even my coffee machine started sweating. And yet, despite this track record, we are now expected to believe that a government-grade version of Grok in a cheap suit will somehow keep the bureaucracy from crumbling into dust?
And what does GSAi actually do?
Well, it can draft emails.
Write talking points.
Summarize text.
Generate generic and guessable answers.
Write more emails.
Write more talking points.
But where do all these emails and talking points go to? And what conversations will be summarized? Does GSAi have a secret little brother, big GSAi plays government with?
Who knows.
But what we do know is that the federal government is now being held together by an AI that functions like a drunk parrot. It is repeating words with confidence but absolutely no understanding. And let’s not forget that employees are explicitly told not to feed it non-public information.
Huh?
Meaning?
The one thing that might make it useful, like actual government data, is the one thing it can’t process. This is the tech equivalent of handing a soldier a water gun in a firefight.
But let’s talk about efficiency.
Musk looooves efficiency.
Loves it so much, in fact, that he fired 80% of Twitter’s workforce overnight, only to watch as X became a half-functioning, ad-ridden wasteland full of bots and scam accounts. And now DOGE is running the same playbook. Hoppa! Slash the workforce, install a cheap AI bandage, and pretend nothing’s on fire.
Now, entire agencies are left wondering how long before they get replaced by a government version of Clippy that says, “It looks like you’re drafting a law. Would you like some help?”
My God my dear American friends.
I always held you guys in such high regard.
But allowing Skum to rampage through the government with a Chatbot?
I just hope the check still gets paid at the end of the month.
And yet, this is what we’re calling progress. The federal government is automating itself into non-existence. Because when you replace humans with AI that hallucinates answers, the outcome is inevitable. Contracts get mismanaged. Funding goes missing (missing where? You guess). Decisions are made based on machine-generated bullshit. And suddenly, the only people left in charge are the ones who programmed the chatbot.
Good luck with that!
This is why I wrote about Musk’s obsession with roasting people using Grok. Because it’s exactly what’s happening now, but at the government level. We are watching Musk’s own playbook being used to dismantle an entire bureaucracy. Roast the old system, burn it to the ground, replace it with AI that can’t function. And when everything collapses? Just blame the “inefficiencies” of government. Classic.
DOGE TOOK ONE LOOK AT “JANKY” AND SAID, ‘SHIP IT’
Let’s talk about speed now. GSAi wasn’t some masterstroke of DOGE innovation. It was already in the works before Musk’s crew showed up, but it was so bad that it hadn’t been deployed. One former employee literally described these chatbots as “janky”. So what did DOGE do? They took that festering mess and shipped it anyway.
Other agencies like the Treasury, Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, had been working on their own chatbots too.
But they hesitated.
They wanted something that would help employees, not replace them. And then DOGE showed up, cackling like a mad scientist, and rolled out an AI that is designed to be a substitute for thousands of actual jobs.
And the thing is that some of the people they fired were the ones building the AI in the first place. Because why not?
It’s the government equivalent of firing your engineers, then asking Siri to build a bridge.
Hold on, don’t go away now!
Because, my oh my, it gets better. Way better.
The Department of Defense has been toying with chatbots too. And guess what. They suck. The best ones are glorified search engines. The worst take conflicting information and hallucinate a solution that is wrong for literally everyone involved.
Which means if you want any sort of reliable answers, you’ll need a different chatbot for every single department. And then you’ll need people to maintain them. And suddenly, what was supposed to be a cost-saving measure has turned into an expensive, bureaucratic nightmare.
Just think about it.
You’re firing a team of seasoned professionals, then hiring three times as many AI wranglers just to keep their replacement from melting down.
But maybe that’s the plan.
Maybe the real goal here isn’t efficiency at all.
Maybe it’s to break the government so thoroughly that people stop believing it can function.
Then, when the rubble settles, you can swoop in and say, “See? Told you it was a mess”. And all of that while you’re hoping that nobody remembers that the mess started after you fired everyone who knew what they were doing.
THE GOVERNMENT. NOW AVAILABLE AS A STREAMING SERVICE
So, where does this all end. They have already replaced the Treasury with Bitcoin. Congress maybe? That’s next. Instead of politicians, we’ll just have chatbots trained on soundbites from Twitter. The judicial system perhaps? AI-powered sentencing. No biggie. Aha! The presidency! Who needs a human when you can just install a rootkit.
And once everything is automated?
Boom.
The entire government, available on demand.
The United States of America, now a SaaS product. Monthly subscription required. Want laws that don’t glitch out? That’s an in-app purchase. Need a passport? Hope you remembered your login credentials.
Can’t wait for the day when instead of screaming “AGENT” into a phone tree, we’ll be screaming at GSAi, praying it doesn’t accidentally sign over federal buildings to a chatbot that thinks it's a real estate mogul.
But hey, at least it can draft emails. Maybe it can write a resignation letter for whoever thought this was a good idea.
Marco.
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Stick around if you like what I write. If not, don’t worry, the AI already already knows you were here.
To keep you doomscrolling ??