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Musk is also the leader of xAI, an AI company whose chatbot is rivaling those from OpenAI, an organization Musk also co-founded.
Musk says a mix of agency shutdowns, workforce trims and heavy automation could shave about 15%, $1 trillion, from the federal budget. Watchdogs call the math wishful and highlight potential conflicts of interest. As of April 2025, DOGE has reported $160 billion in projected savings. To date, about $32.5 billion of these savings are independently verifiable, according to a BBC analysis.
This AI-driven agenda to drive operational efficiency has draw scrutiny for its perceived opacity and unconventional flair. Musk’s DOGE team, for instance, reportedly favored encrypted messaging platforms like Signal with disappearing messages for their communications and used shared Google Docs for collaborative work, rather than adhering to standard, archivable government systems, according to Reuters. Internal staffers at DOGE have reportedly used various flavors of its Grok chatbot for making government “less dumb,” per TechCrunch.
At the EPA, for example, employees have reportedly been cautioned to “Be careful what you say, what you type and what you do,” as AI would be searching for those not aligned with the prevailing mission.
The push for AI-augmented efficiency extended to direct performance evaluations, with federal employees controversially mandated to submit weekly “five-bullet” summaries of their accomplishments. These summaries were reportedly intended for an AI system to assess individual roles, a process critics decried as overly simplistic. One commentator characterized the approach as akin to “throw[ing] everyone’s answers into an algorithmic woodchipper” without proper context.
Such talk is not new. In February, Thomas Shedd, the then recently appointed Technology Transformation Services director, described his agency’s new strategy as “AI-first,” as Wired then pointed out.
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