Government Executive - Tech

Federal workforce trauma is creating a stumbling block for AI adoption

Howard Risher — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400

The federal government and the U.S. economy is at a crossroad. There are two contrary but seemingly independent developments that have profound implications for the workforce. Both sides cannot be correct but to build support for what’s unfolding the differences need to be understood and resolved.

One is the rapid transformation of jobs and work systems driven by AI. The frequent headlines contend the drive to roll out AI is the future. It’s inevitable. The titles suggest a solidly optimistic view that AI will be:

“a Net Economic Accelerator,”
“a Force for Better Work, Not Job Loss,”
“a Force for Better Work, Not Job Loss,”
“a Driver of Safer, More Efficient Daily Life.”

The contrary argument has made the headlines of the country’s more prominent websites:

CNN — “Tech industry experts warn AI will make us worse ...”
Forbes — “The Real Threat of AI: WEF Global Risks Report 2025”
BBC — “Artificial intelligence could lead to extinction, experts ...”
The New York Times — “The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World”

There have also been reports and columns arguing AI has revealed problems in how government work is organized and managed, and from a GAO report, that the work models are not suited to AI integration.

DOGE made the problems worse

Elon Musk has been very vocal. On one side, he contends AI will create unprecedented abundance, producing goods and services “far in excess” of current levels. He has also argued AI will eliminate most or all human jobs. When that happens, he promoted a form of government-provide “universal high income.”

Musk is relevant of course because of what he and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) did to the federal workforce. Through 2025 DOGE initiated (1) mandatory attrition targets, (2) reductions-in-force plans, (3) a hiring freeze and (4) contract cancellations that removed contractor employees. The actions triggered 348,219 individuals to quit, retire, were laid off or otherwise left federal employment. At the same time, 116,912 people started working for the federal government — a 55.6% decrease from the year before. The net reduction, according to the Pew Research Center, was nearly 238,000.

The impact on the workforce has been pronounced. There has been a loss of institutional knowledge, support functions disappeared, worker shortages have impeded agency performance, and reports contend agencies are struggling to maintain mission delivery. The Brookings Institute expert, Elaine Kamarck, reported the cuts made agencies “scramble to fill critical gaps in services” ... There are time bombs all over the place ... They’ve wreaked havoc across nearly every agency.”

Employees are not open to AI

When the Office of Personnel Management canceled the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey for 2025, the Partnership for the Public Service created and conducted a similar survey late in the year. It had responses from 11,083 employees across executive branch agencies.

The survey “revealed significant challenges” — read significant declines — in federal employee engagement and morale in 2025. The Partnership’s CEO, Max Stier, made it clear what the decline means:

“We have every red light blinking across the federal government. Morale is as low as imaginable.”

“This workforce has been fundamentally traumatized ... That’s not good for anyone. It’s bad for the workforce, it’s fundamentally bad for the American people, and it will lead to use be less safe, healthy, and prosperous as a society.”

“This loss of expertise directly harms Americans’ access to critical services and will take decades to repair. [The losses leave] dangerous gaps in key federal services, like food safety inspection, Social Security processing, veterans’ health care and disaster response.”

Research in other sectors by Gallup and others shows clearly a demoralized workforce triggers a high cost. In Gallup’s terms, that is when employees are “actively disengaged” or “unhappy and unproductive at work.” There is no direct comparison but the Partnership’s survey shows the “chainsaw” workforce cuts left the workforce “traumatized.” Psychological safety “collapsed.” It could hardly be worse.

The Partnerships analyses show the “reforms to the federal government cost the U.S. economy more than $165.6 billion ...” Possibly more important going forward is the loss of the better performance when employees are fully engaged. Gallup has promoted the value of engaged employees for over three decades. Their research has linked engagement levels to a long list of employee performance metrics.

Gallup “research has repeatedly shown that engaged employees are the lifeblood of successful organizations. They are not just loyal and productive; they the driving force behind innovation and customer satisfaction.” Their research “... reveals a stark contrast between teams with highly engaged employees and those struggling with disengagement.” Companies with an engaged workforce are more productive, more profitable and have higher customer satisfaction.

OPM has reported its measure of employee engagement for years but for unclear reasons has never reported finding a connection between employee engagement and performance. However, it is very clear that is no longer a consideration.

Research also shows clearly disengaged workers are not open and supportive of implementing AI. That point was emphasized in a recent "Forbes" column, “Why You Can’t Lead an AI Revolution Without Engaged Managers.” A column summarizing Glassdoor reviews and social media posts related to AI concluded many “employees are pretending to use AI tools just to comply with internal protocols ... multiple people admitted to exaggerating or fabricating their usage.”

Projected national job losses

From a broader perspective, researchers at Tuft’s Fletcher School of Global Affairs recently released the American AI Jobs Risk Index. It summarized the projected job losses for 784 occupations in 20 industries.

“It is a first-of-its-kind data-driven framework that maps the potential of AI-driven job vulnerability across every major occupation, industry, metropolitan area and state in the United States. ... the Index goes beyond prior studies by measuring actual vulnerability to job loss — not merely exposure — and connecting that vulnerability directly to projected income loss and geography.”

“The Index projects approximately 9.3 million U.S. jobs are at risk of displacement in the next 2–5 years, with a plausible range of 2.7 to 19.5 million depending on alternative adoption scenarios. Associated household income at risk spans $200 billion to $1.5 trillion annually ... equivalent to the economies of Belgium and, under faster AI adoption, approaching that of South Korea.”

“Industry-wide vulnerability averages approximately 6%, but the steepest risks sit in Information (18%), Finance and Insurance (16%) and Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services (16%).”

Based on the Index estimates, the country will lose from the three groups a total of over 3 million jobs. The federal government has an AI estimated 128,500 Information specialists (in 14 job series) and would lose 23,000 specialists.

The biggest losses are projected to be in California, Texas, New York, Florida and Illinois. The losses are also high in the District of Columbia. “Wired Belts” like Ann Arbor and Boulder could become “Rust Belts.” That will have political consequences.

The economic concerns include:

Job displacement and lost income
Wage suppression prompted by reduced labor demand
Increased economic inequality benefiting capital investors
Erosion of human skills and loss of adaptability

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ made a disturbing AI prophecy: “Humans won’t be needed ‘for most things' in 10 years.”

Public policy debate: Regulation needed?

As long ago as 2021, the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, proposed the first EU artificial intelligence law, establishing a risk-based AI classification system. It did not pass initially but in 2024 the EU Artificial Intelligence Act became the world’s first comprehensive AI law.

In contrast, President Trump released a promised “AI Action Plan” in July 2025 that outlined “over 90 federal actions focused on three areas of focus: increasing private-sector innovation, expanding AI-related infrastructure and exporting American AI.” He followed that with three Executive Orders promoting American AI products.

In December he signed an EO intended to override certain state laws on AI, with department heads to identify the laws deemed “burdensome.” All 50 states considered AI-related measures in 2025.

A number of prominent scholars and economists have argued legislation is needed. A core issue is — developments in AI are ongoing and it’s not possible to anticipate in advance what may be warranted. Tomorrow’s AI systems could be very different. It is clear that the legal process is slow, incentives are misaligned and the complexity of AI systems is growing faster than governance.

Questions for Elon Musk: When will the economy warrant creating the government-provided universal high income? Does it ride on high unemployment or low family income? How will it be funded?

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CBP seeks AI solutions to keep pace with rising volumes of border scans

Nick Wakeman — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:46:47 -0400

Customs and Border Protection is facing a volume problem as it expands the scanning of cars and trucks at ports of entry.

The so-called non-intrusive inspection scanning technology that CBP is deploying greatly increases the number of vehicles scanned.

“The sheer volume of data generated by increased scanning can be overwhelming for human operators, necessitating innovative solutions to maintain efficiency and effectiveness,” the agency writes in a sources sought notice posted Wednesday.

CBP uses X-rays to scan full-size vehicles – commercial trucks, cargo containers, and privately owned cars – without physically opening or unloading them. The agency's systems generate tens of thousands of images a day across multiple types of scanners.

To address this volume challenge, CBP wants to use more artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions. But the agency does not want a proprietary data platform, data pipeline or case management system.

Instead, the agency wants algorithmic components that can be integrated with existing and planned CBP-owned data platforms.

CBP is looking for help with using a human-in-the-loop approach. AI will serve as a tool as “CBP’s frontline personnel remain the most critical asset to thwarting illicit goods crossing our borders,” the request for information states.

While the agency emphasizes in the notice that employees are its most valued resource, “CBP recognizes that technology is a vital element to mission success.”

The agency wants information on algorithm products, including performance metrics related to:

Anomaly detection
Manifest/commodity verification
Identifying modifications, such as concealment locations
Contraband detection.

Responses are due May 30.

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White House is drafting plans to permit federal Anthropic use

Alexandra Kelley and David DiMolfetta — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:39:06 -0400

The White House is crafting guidance that would allow federal agencies to bypass a supply chain risk designation on Anthropic and clear the way for government use of its tools, including the cyber-focused Mythos AI model, according to an industry source familiar with the matter.

The move is notable because it suggests the Trump administration may be softening its stance on Anthropic. The Pentagon labeled Anthropic as a supply chain risk earlier this year — and the White House later ordered a governmentwide phaseout of its technology — after the AI company declined to ease restrictions on its products being used in domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

The administration is also drafting an AI executive order that could, in part, address how the government uses Anthropic's tools, a second person familiar with the matter said.

Both sources spoke on the condition of anonymity to communicate non-public details. Nextgov/FCW has asked Anthropic for comment.

"The White House continues to proactively engage across government and industry to protect our country and the American people, including by working with frontier AI labs," a White House official told Nextgov/FCW. "The collective effort of all involved will ultimately benefit our economy and country. However, any policy announcement will come directly from the President and anything else is pure speculation."

Axios first reported on the White House's plans.

Mythos, unveiled earlier this year, has become a tipping point for cybersecurity and AI practitioners because it demonstrates how advanced models can be purpose-built for real-world cyber operations, including those planned inside the intelligence community. In the wrong hands, it could be used to carry out sophisticated cyberattacks against government networks, critical infrastructure or other key U.S. systems.

As soon as Mythos was unveiled, the company launched Project Glasswing, a private coalition of firms that aims to use the model to patch critical vulnerabilities across the global internet before AI-assisted cyber threats become widespread.

Last week, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine said at a national security event in Nashville that autonomous weapons will be a “key and essential part of everything we do,” pointing to a broader military push to integrate AI into defense operations.

“I want our nation using all of our best [AI] models,” retired Gen. Paul Nakasone, who led NSA and Cyber Command, told reporters in a briefing at that same event hosted by Vanderbilt University.

“I don’t think it was accurate that Anthropic is a supply chain risk,” added Nakasone, who also serves on the board of OpenAI. “I feel uncomfortable with the fact that part of our nation’s capability is not being used by our government.”

The dispute between Anthropic and the Trump administration has rattled Washington’s AI vendor landscape over the last couple of months, with companies scrambling for clarity on contracting requirements as uncertainty grows over how the government will handle how much use of Anthropic products is permissible.

The company has legally challenged the supply chain risk label. A federal judge issued a temporary injunction on the designation and ban in late March, which the government has said it intends to appeal.

Last week, President Donald Trump said in a CNBC interview that the company is “shaping up” and can “be of great use” in the future, a sign that tensions between Anthropic and the government may be easing.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to include comment from the White House.

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FDA to pilot real-time clinical drug trials through cloud and AI

Frank Konkel — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:15:17 -0400

Through a new pilot program announced this week, the Food and Drug Administration will use artificial intelligence and cloud computing to monitor clinical trial data in real time, an effort that could ultimately shave years off the approval timelines for new drugs, devices and medications.

FDA commissioner Marty Makary announced “the first ever real-time clinical trial” Tuesday at a press conference held at FDA’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Md. “Today is a milestone day for us to challenge the assumption that it takes 10 to 12 years for a new drug to come to market.”

Makary said about 45% of the time between when a company conducts a Phase 1 clinical trial and submits its applications—which can sometimes be millions of pages long—to the FDA is “dead time,” where investigators and staff are doing “paperwork and other tasks, many of which are tedious.”

The pilot allows the agency to have “a direct data feed from a clinical trial, where the FDA will see what is happening, in the cloud, with the predefined clinical endpoints and any other signals investigators and regulators decide are valuable,” Makary said. “When a patient develops a fever, or a tumor shrinks, FDA regulators can see in the cloud, in real-time, exactly what is happening.”

FDA Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer Jeremy Walsh, who Makary credited as a driving force behind the pilot, said the idea for real-time drug trials manifested last summer through a confluence of the right personnel, emerging technologies and leadership’s drive to modernize the review process, which had not changed much since the 1960s.

Walsh told reporters that “while there is an opportunity to shave off” as much as 40% of the clinical trial time, the agency won’t be cutting corners on safety.

“The goal here is to sort of get to a regulatory decision in a faster timeline, without compromising any safety,” Walsh said. “The goal here is to raise the bar for what can be done. We are reimagining what information we need and when we need it in order to make a decision.”

So far, two clinical trials conducted by pharma companies AstraZeneca and Amgen will pilot the new system.

“The ultimate goal is to move data as quickly as possible across this ecosystem to accelerate our ability to bring new therapies to patients to make a meaningful difference in their lives,” said Amy McKee, oncology senior vice president at AstraZeneca.

In conjunction with the announcement, the FDA released a request for information for the public and industry to solicit input regarding how AI-enabled technologies “can improve efficiency, speed and quality of decision-making in early phase clinical trials.” Responses are due May 29 and could shape an expansion of the pilot this summer.

FDA’s broader tech modernization effort

During the press conference, Makary highlighted several major modernization efforts undertaken by FDA’s IT and AI team, a brain-trust that includes Walsh, acting chief information officer Sridhar Mantha, acting deputy CIO Sanjay Sahoo and acting associate director of business operations Gregory Jackson.

“Thanks to the moderation efforts by our entire IT and AI team here at FDA, we have been able to get away from the fiefdom culture where every center has to have their own license agreement for the same software and their own system,” Makary said. “We have done a massive consolidation.”

Over the past year, FDA consolidated 40 separate application intake systems into a single system, further consolidated its three data monitoring systems and seven adverse event reporting systems each to single systems, and systematically reduced the duplication of various software licenses across the agency’s multiple centers.These consolidation efforts—performed without additional staff or resources after significant staff downsizing in early 2025—“is going to save us at least $120 million a year,” said Makary, noting that money would be reinvested in the scientific community, new technologies and rehiring as many as 3,000 new scientists.

“That added reserve in our resources will support our bold reform agenda,” Makary said.

The agency has also taken massive steps in adopting generative AI.

Walsh, speaking last week at Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas, said in early 2025, about 1% of the agency’s workforce regularly used generative AI in their jobs. Today, the agency has a generative AI adoption rate of more than 80%, with some individual centers exceeding 90%. One of its most popular tools is Elsa, a large language model-powered tool that assists employees with reading, writing and summarizing reports.

FDA makes use of both Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude models.

“We have deployed enterprise AI across the entire agency, giving our highly skilled, highly-educated workforce access to all these tools,” said Walsh, adding that AI is helping FDA achieve its mission faster. “One of the great things about working with companies like Google in this is the speed at which we can get access to the models where our data sits. When new models are released, we can get access to the model in a week. For us, we need to make sure we have access to the latest capabilities and tools.”

Walsh said in early pilots, AI has already dramatically reduced timelines for data- and documentation-intensive regulatory duties FDA regularly performs, in some cases reducing administrative tasks from 10 days down to 20 minutes.

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Treasury missed security controls in giving DOGE system access, GAO finds

Natalie Alms — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:41:16 -0400

Congress’ watchdog reported on Tuesday that the Treasury Department gave a Department of Government Efficiency associate access to the government’s payment systems last year without fully following all of its own security controls — and the DOGE team didn’t always hew to Treasury’s protocols, either.

The findings are among the first reports the Government Accountability Office has released about DOGE’s work, and GAO is working on more audits focused on DOGE access to government systems, a spokesperson confirmed with Nextgov/FCW on Tuesday.

The new report on Treasury zeroes in on atypical access to the government’s payment systems given to DOGE associates.

DOGE access to sensitive government data and systems across agencies has been a flashpoint since the early days of Trump’s second term. DOGE associates said in court testimony earlier this year that pushing for high-level access to government systems was “operating procedure” for the group.

At Treasury, soon after Trump took office last year, individuals on billionaire Elon Musk’s team reportedly began pressing for officials to hand over system access to DOGE employee Tom Krause so that the department could freeze foreign aid payments. A top Treasury official was eventually pushed out of his job after refusing to provide access to the systems.

GAO found that Treasury handed over access to view, copy and print data from the Bureau of Fiscal Service’s three payment systems to an unnamed DOGE associate, who could also see the systems’ source code.

But that member of Musk’s team never completed required security training while working at the department or signed Treasury’s “rules of behavior” policy for IT security while working there.

GAO doesn’t name this DOGE employee in its report, but other details provided by the watchdog match with public reporting on Marko Elez, like the day he resigned, Feb. 6, 2025, following reporting about his racist social media posts. He later went on to work for DOGE at other agencies.

At one point, Treasury accidentally briefly gave that same DOGE employee the ability to make changes in one of those systems, something GAO said was due in part to the agency’s lax procedures and the fact that the access being requested was changed several times before it was approved. The DOGE employee didn’t use the system during this time, GAO says. According to reporting on court records, this was also Elez.

GAO also found that Treasury’s data loss prevention tools didn’t track or block Elez from improperly sending unencrypted information on foreign aid to two DOGE associates at the General Services Administration. Elez did this without getting agency approval for sharing the information on U.S. Agency for International Development payments.

Treasury didn’t discover that incident until it conducted a forensic review of the laptop after Elez had left the department. The department didn’t find the incident sooner in part because its tools aren’t set up to look for information being sent to other government agencies, the report says.

GAO included several recommendations regarding the department’s IT security processes in the audit, only some of which Treasury formally agreed with.

The top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., said in a statement that “GAO has confirmed our worst fears,” and called on the Treasury to implement all of GAO’s recommendations.

Among those the department didn’t formally agree or disagree with is one urging it to conduct exit interviews and get signatures on post-employment documentation from those with access to sensitive payment systems who leave the department without doing so — including the DOGE employee discussed in the report with access to systems.

The watchdog will be issuing additional reports on DOGE access to Treasury payment systems, it says in the report. The topic has also been working its way through the courts. A district court judge granted a preliminary injunction limiting DOGE access to Treasury systems with sensitive information last year, although that was later modified to allow some access to systems.

GAO also released another report Tuesday on DOGE’s access to systems at the NLRB. Just over a year ago, a whistleblower in the agency said that DOGE had extracted troves of data from the agency using secretive methods during March 2025.

The NLRB’s inspector general has an ongoing investigation into the whistleblower’s declaration, the office confirmed to Nextgov/FCW.

GAO’s new report, however, focuses only on the period after DOGE was detailed into the agency in mid-April, so “to not overlap with the NLRB Inspector General’s Investigation.”

Whistleblower Aid, which is representing the NLRB whistleblower, noted the significance of GAO beginning its review period after their client’s disclosed events took place.

“Because the GAO did not investigate any matters that fell within the timeframe disclosed by our client — in fact scoping it out of their investigation — the report cannot address our client's detailed accounts,” Whistleblower Aid told Nextgov/FCW. “Accordingly, the timeframe investigated by the GAO has no relationship to the wrongdoing witnessed by the whistleblower in February to early April 2025.”

GAO found that the DOGE team asked for access to NLRB systems, but didn’t use the access it was granted. DOGE didn’t even pick up NLRB laptops before their detail agreements expired in July, according to GAO.

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NIST is giving fingerprint examiners better tools for a messy job

John Breeden II — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:49:32 -0400

Americans have spent generations watching detectives in dark trenchcoats pore over complex crime scenes in movies and on television. They examine the room, snap photos and break out the familiar blue powder to dust for fingerprints. The ritual is so familiar that it can seem almost automatic.

What those scenes rarely capture is how much effort goes into making fingerprint examination more accurate, more consistent and easier to teach. That quieter work is exactly what the National Institute of Standards and Technology is trying to strengthen.

NIST recently released two resources aimed at helping forensic fingerprint examiners do their jobs better. One is a fully annotated version of NIST’s Special Database 302, a collection of roughly 10,000 latent fingerprint images. The other is what NIST calls OpenLQM, newly created open-source software that helps assess the quality of latent fingerprints and sort them according to how much useful detail they contain. NIST says the two releases are meant to improve forensic fingerprint examination, which remains an important part of many criminal investigations.

Fingerprint analysis is one of those forensic tools that many people assume was perfected long ago. In reality, examiners often work with partial, smudged or otherwise imperfect prints recovered from real-world objects. Training people to evaluate those prints well takes experience, repetition and good examples. It also increasingly requires better ways to train software systems that can assist human examiners without replacing them.

NIST says the newly completed dataset will help train both human examiners and machine learning algorithms to distinguish important features and weigh their value as evidence.

The most vivid part of the NIST fingerprint accuracy project is how ordinary the source material really was. As NIST computer scientist Greg Fiumara explained, “The prints are from people we recruited to come in and do things like write a note, pick up a circuit board, handle a dollar bill, that sort of thing. Then we recovered the prints they left behind using different methods that crime scene investigators commonly use.”

So the new collection is not made up of idealized prints from a textbook. They are the kinds of latent impressions that people leave behind all the time while moving through everyday life.

That realism has been part of the project from the beginning. When NIST first released SD 302 in 2019, it described the database as a set of latent fingerprints left on everyday items by a few hundred volunteers in a lab setting, with other personal information stripped away. The point was not to create a neat archive of perfect examples, but to give researchers and examiners a more realistic way to measure accuracy and test methods against the kinds of prints they actually encounter.

What is new now is that the entire collection has been annotated. Those annotations mark details about fingerprint quality, including regions where ridge patterns are clear, smudged or incomplete.

NIST says those markings make the dataset much more valuable as a teaching tool because they show both humans and algorithms what to look for and what to avoid when evaluating a print. The annotations add structure and interpretive guidance to a dataset that already had broad global use. NIST says more than 1,000 research organizations in more than 90 countries have downloaded the collection since its initial release.

The second part of the project is just as practical. OpenLQM gives examiners a way to score the quality of a latent print on a scale from zero to 100. And it can run as a standard executable or be embedded inside another program or application for maximum portability. The new software can help investigators sort through large volumes of prints and focus their attention first on the ones most likely to contain useful identifying details.

As Fiumara put it, “you give OpenLQM a fingerprint and it returns a number from zero to 100 that is an assessment of the print’s quality.” NIST says the software was adapted from a tool once limited to U.S. law enforcement. It is now being made openly available in a form that can run on Mac, Windows or Linux.

Since the software is open-source and available for anyone to download, NIST is not just improving a government tool for internal use; it’s pushing better forensic resources into the wider scientific and practitioner community. The agency’s biometrics resources page now lists both Special Database 302 and OpenLQM among its available forensic databases and software tools, reinforcing the point that this is part of a broader effort to build reproducible, shareable infrastructure around forensic biometrics.

What makes the fingerprint accuracy project especially useful is that it focuses on the less glamorous side of forensic work. Instead of chasing some dramatic new breakthrough, NIST is improving the underlying tools that fingerprint examiners rely on every day. Better data, clearer annotations and a faster way to assess print quality may not look dramatic from the outside, but they can make difficult work more consistent and efficient.

That is what gives this release its value. It strengthens one of forensic science’s oldest disciplines without pretending to reinvent it. Human judgment still matters, and fingerprint work will probably always involve a measure of skill and interpretation.

So all those movies and TV shows with investigators (still wearing stylish black trenchcoats) dusting for prints will still be accurate — at least for now. But with better training material and advanced tools, that work can become more consistent and easier to teach while also producing more trustworthy results.

John Breeden II is an award-winning journalist and reviewer with over 20 years of experience covering technology. He is the CEO of the Tech Writers Bureau, a group that creates technological thought leadership content for organizations of all sizes. Twitter: @LabGuys

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IRS lacks transparent plans to leverage tech in the face of staffing cuts, GAO and employees say

Natalie Alms — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:00:00 -0400

The IRS is banking on using technology to do more with fewer employees. But staff inside the IRS say that how the agency will do that — considering that its own IT shop has lost personnel — is still unclear, and Congress’ watchdog says that the IRS still isn’t being transparent about its long-term tech plans.

The IRS continues to rely on some systems that date back to the 1960s. It’s been trying to modernize them for decades, and was using some of the money from the Inflation Reduction Act to do so under the Biden administration. Congress has since clawed back most of that funding, and the remainder is set to run out in fiscal year 2028.

A few months after President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office, the IRS paused its modernization work to re-evaluate its strategy. IRS leadership said they wanted to rely more on generative artificial intelligence to convert legacy code into modern programming languages, and the agency set a goal to finish most of its tech modernization efforts within two years.

Over a year later, the IRS still hasn’t provided the Government Accountability Office with details on its new modernization plan, said David Hinchman, director of IT and cybersecurity at GAO, during a recent roundtable on the IRS.

“Recent changes to IRS' long-term plans have also cast uncertainty over what the agency's modernized end state will look like,” said Hinchman, explaining that the IRS has published “very little” on its new approach.

That’s despite the fact that technological progress is a lynchpin in the IRS’ bigger, overall strategy. After already pushing out over 28,000 employees since Trump took office, the tax agency is aiming to shed more staff and use technology to make up the difference, it said in its recent budget request.

“Without modernization, the IRS would be unable to sustain performance with a reduced headcount,” the budget request said.

Compounding the lack of transparency is a pause in strategic workforce planning, said Hinchman, which would help ensure that the IRS has the right workforce to get the job done.

The IRS didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The IRS hasn’t spared its IT shop from the workforce upheaval that has taken place over the last year. The IRS lost over 2,600 IT employees between January 25 and December 18 of last year, a 31% reduction, according to the National Taxpayer Advocate’s 2025 report.

The IRS also moved over 1,000 IT staff to the office of the chief operating officer last winter, and transferred some of those to jobs helping with filing season, along with human resources specialists.

Agency IT leadership recently told staff that the agency plans to hire 175 IT employees, a tech employee at the agency said.

Even so, IRS leadership isn’t sharing much information internally on the agency’s current plan for its technology, a second tech employee told Nextgov/FCW. Detailed IT strategic plans used to be available within the agency, they said. What’s now available is very abstract.

“It’s hilarious,” they said of the claim that the IRS can use tech to make up for fewer employees.

Using technology to do more with less might be possible in the long run, but “not right now,” the first IT employee told Nextgov/FCW. “We are so short-staffed.”

Despite the staffing shortages, the IRS is planning to capitalize on updates to the online accounts it offers for taxpayers to give Americans access to more self-service options.

The agency is also building a single interface for customer service representatives to allow them to see data about taxpayers that’s currently stored in disparate systems in one centralized place. The IRS thinks this will cut down on call times by speeding up the work of those manning the phone lines. The agency has been trying to build this system since the second Obama administration.

The IRS has also long been working to modernize its core system for individual tax account data, called the individual master file.

The tax agency did put its long-awaited new processing engine for the system into production last year, it said, but more work needs to be done. The effort is one of the most complex modernization efforts in the federal government, and the individual master file touches hundreds of other IRS applications.

“They are shoving AI at us and they think that with that, things can be converted super quickly,” the first employee said of efforts to modernize legacy systems. “But they don’t have the right tools for us yet.”

Frank Bisignano — the head of the Social Security Administration who is also helming a new chief executive officer role at the IRS — told senators earlier this month that data and AI are helping the tax agency with enforcement, even as it’s lost staff and is set to lose more under the Trump administration’s recent budget request.

But GAO reported recently that the agency is facing a skills shortage that could hamper its ability to roll out AI, including systems to prioritize audits.

Among the things that aren’t clear to Congress’ watchdog are how the IRS’ new plans relate to its old strategy to modernize, as well as how and if certain endeavors are continuing, said Hinchman. This isn’t the first time that watchdogs have dinged the IRS for a lack of IT planning.

Leadership under the new administration has altered at least some efforts started during the Biden years. The IRS launched an initiative to digitize paper with funding from the Inflation Reduction Act in 2023 by developing an in-house system. Last spring, leadership directed the IRS to stop working on the project, despite spending $61 million on it already, and shifted to a new approach using contractors, according to a watchdog report.

The IRS also shuttered the Direct File program, launched in 2024 to help certain eligible Americans file their taxes with the government online for free.

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GSA No. 2 talks ‘million hours challenge,’ scaling agency AI efforts

Frank Konkel — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 11:26:00 -0400

The General Services Administration is working to save and automate one million hours of workload across the agency as part of its Eliminate, Optimize and Automate — or EOA — playbook.

GSA Deputy Administrator Michael Lynch said the effort aims to use artificial intelligence and intelligent automation to handle “repetitive, manual workflows,” allowing its workforce to redirect their time toward serving customer agencies, improving procurement outcomes and pursuing other mission-critical services. Early into 2026, Lynch said the agency is almost halfway toward achieving its moonshot goal.

“We have about 400,000 hours that are currently identified of ways that we can — not replace people — but remove that non-high-value added time and replace it by putting people on more high-value opportunities within the agency,” Lynch said April 14 at the OpenText Government Summit in Washington, D.C. “And that really goes to address some of the workforce challenges we’ve had.”

Lynch added that GSA, like most agencies across government, lost headcount over the past year, but he asserted the leaner setup hasn’t slowed operations.

In 2025, the agency took on a centralized role in federal acquisition and led a massive overhaul of the process; became a key cog in the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan through the launch of USAI.gov; and negotiated more than two dozen deals with tech companies, saving partner agencies more than $1 billion on software through its OneGov program, according to Lynch.

Still, the agency is looking at more ways to drive innovation, foster collaboration and develop future leaders within its ranks — while tackling some of the agency’s toughest problems.

Called GSA Labs, the new program seeks a few dozen high-performing early-to-mid-career employees within the agency who will be placed into small, cross-functional teams with executive sponsorship to tackle those problems.

“We did a call to action for all of our senior leaders to say, ‘What are the problems that exist within automation technology, workflows and things that you want to dedicate resources to, that you just don't have the staff to do it?’” Lynch said. “And then we put out a call to our workforce to say, ‘Hey, if you’re kind of mid-career talent, would you be interested in doing a second job in addition to your day job — not a second pay job — but you know, be part of this program?’”

Lynch said the response was “amazing,” totaling more than 300 internal applicants who were narrowed to an initial cohort of 30 GSA staff to address five problem statements with a goal of “trying to create interoperable systems and processes."

He noted GSA Labs’ work is largely internal now, but “could be a scalable program in the future.”

“We have 30 individuals from GSA that are going to be almost our internal McKinsey consulting group that’s going to come in and help us solve these problems in partnership with leaders,” Lynch said. “And then the hope would be that further develops our workforce, develops great outcomes for our agency. And then where the program goes in year two and beyond is a bit up in the air.”

Maturation of OneGov

Far from a one-hit wonder, Lynch said to expect a maturation of GSA’s OneGov effort, which netted more than two dozen discounted deals for agencies from AI and tech software firms, including Google Public Sector, Adobe, Salesforce, Elastic, Oracle, Uber, IBM, Docusign, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, OpenAI, Anthropic and Box.

Some of those were relatively short-term deals, and GSA is using feedback from industry and agencies to inform how that program evolves into “longer-term, scalable programs and engagements that are mutually beneficial for both the federal government as well as our industry partners.”

“Over the next six to nine months, you’ll see a lot more announcements around how those OneGov deals have matured,” Lynch said.

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Agencies report over 3,000 AI use cases in 2025

Alexandra Kelley — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400

The Office of Management and Budget unveiled the completed 2025 Federal Agency Artificial Intelligence Use Case Inventory, documenting 3,611 individual use cases across 56 submitting agencies.

This represents a 105% increase from 2024’s reported use cases, which came in at 1,757.

Pursuant to several executive actions and congressional laws, including the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act and an April 2025 memo from the Office of Management and Budget, federal agencies are required to report how AI tools are being used in their operations.

OMB is the only office agencies are required to report to, the agency confirmed, adding that use cases employed by the Intelligence Community and Pentagon are exempted from reporting, and other agencies are exempted from reporting National Security use cases. The complete repository was last updated on April 14.

The Department of Health and Human Services reported the most active use cases at 447 — a sizable leap from the 271 reported in 2024. Trailing HHS with the largest number of use cases are NASA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Justice, reporting 425, 367, 340 and 314, respectively.

HHS drove the growth in AI acquisition both in 2024 as well as in 2025.

Use case rationales are diverse. Text identification, summarization and manipulation; data analytics and pattern recognition; predictive modeling; and chatbot services were all listed as common use case areas in both high- and low-impact programs.

Of the 445 reported use cases that were deemed “high-impact,” Veterans Affairs reported using the most, with 215 high-impact cases. Some of these include: “Summarization of Clinical Data;” “Forescout: AI Behavioral Anomaly Detection w/ Automated Enforcement;” and “VA VoiceBot for Call Center Modernization.”

AI was also applied in some high-impact use cases to focus on natural language processing for text analysis, machine intelligence for small satellites, science translation and identity verification.

Agencies also listed the software providers they were contracting with to support each of the use cases in their respective inventories. Microsoft’s products dominated the list, with 102 use cases operating with a version of the company’s Copilot AI tool.

Anthropic’s Claude was also a frequently mentioned commercial-off-the-shelf solution used in government AI 25 times, with most use cases coming from the Department of State and HHS. Since the fallout between Anthropic and the Pentagon over the company refusing to allow its AI to be used in surveillance and autonomous weapons, the Trump administration subsequently ordered federal agencies to shed their contracts with the company and stop using its software.

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AI is helping VA speed up claims processing, but Dems worry about errors

Edward Graham — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400

The Department of Veterans Affairs has been using artificial intelligence to speed up its processing of veterans’ benefits claims, but VA officials told lawmakers that human reviewers make the final decisions and that greater use of the emerging capabilities has not correlated with an increase in errors or issues — a claim disputed by Democrats.

During a House Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday, Margarita Devlin — principal deputy under secretary for benefits at VA’s Veterans Benefits Administration — told lawmakers that “the average time to process a claim has dropped by 42% since January 2025, from 141 days to just 81 days.”

VA’s recently released 2025 inventory of AI use cases listed 367 examples of the emerging capabilities. Twenty-eight of these use cases are focused on the topic of “government benefits processing,” with the majority of these examples listed as still being in the pre-deployment phase.

One of the active AI use cases — and the one that received the most attention during Wednesday’s hearing — is called Automated Decision Support, or ADS.

VA’s inventory said ADS uses machine learning to automate “some of the up-front time-consuming development activities of retrieving information” and noted that the tool “is not intended to replace trained claims processors — it provides tools to assist with development tasks at a time when [the Veterans Benefits Administration] is receiving more claims than ever before.”

Devlin said the tool can review many elements of a veteran’s claim, such as, “if the veteran served in the Navy, were they then within 12 nautical miles of certain areas to qualify for certain presumptive? It'll look for what were their dates of service, and be able to put that all together. So what the employee is seeing is screens that present to them, ‘this has been satisfied, this piece has been satisfied.’”

Rep. Morgan Luttrell, R-Texas, said he was speaking on behalf of the House panel’s general sentiment when he said “we are eagerly behind the injection of AI models into the system so our veterans get what they need in a timely manner.”

Even as lawmakers expressed cautious support for the use of AI and automated capabilities, like ADS, to streamline claims processing, they pressed VA officials to ensure that the tool is working appropriately and includes human oversight.

Devlin said the AI “does not make any decisions and will not deny a claim,” adding that “it simply puts everything together for the decisionmaker so that they can make the decision faster.” She said that the department also regularly updates the ADS system, estimating that it occurs every six to eight weeks.

Sandra Flint — Deputy Under Secretary for Field Operations at VA’s Veterans Benefits Administration — told lawmakers that even if some of a veterans’ collected data appears to be missing from the tool, “that decisionmaker has the opportunity to go out and get the information, or go find the information he or she needs to to support the veterans’ claim.”

Democrats on the panel, however, were more critical of VA’s use of AI and the ADS tool, linking more reliance on these types of capabilities with what they deemed to be decreasing claims-processing accuracy.

Rep. Maxine Dexter, D-Ore., said she had the opportunity to speak with veteran service officers in her district, who told her that decision times were improving but that “their impression is that errors are increasing.”

Dexter also submitted for the record a claim that, she said, explained a veteran’s employability by referencing Google and that was “followed by a quote — direct quote — from language that certainly appears to be AI-generated content.”

Rep. Tim Kennedy, D-N.Y., also questioned the precision of VA’s reported error rate and said “speed does not equal success.”

Devlin told lawmakers that, as of the end of March, the accuracy rate was over 94%, which she said was “the highest it’s been in two years.”

But Kennedy noted that VA reported a “94% issue-level accuracy, but [an] 83.31% claims-based accuracy.”

Flint said the department switched to an issue-based quality rate “because that gives us a level of detail about what's actually happening in the claim, so we can hone in on the things that are important to veterans,” and added that a “claim-based score sort of masks what the real challenges are, because if you get one wrong, the whole thing is wrong.”

In a Wednesday press release, VA noted that it has reduced its backlog of veterans waiting for benefits “to less than 100,000 claims for the first time since 2020.”

These numbers had ballooned as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as following passage of the PACT Act. The law, signed by former President Joe Biden in August 2022, provided veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxic chemicals during their service with expanded access to health services and benefits for medical conditions not previously covered by VA.

In addition to the AI tool used to streamline claims processors’ review of veterans information, VA is looking to expand its use of the emerging capabilities to other benefits processing responsibilities.

VA Press Secretary Peter Kasperowicz told Nextgov/FCW last month that the department “plans to broaden the ADS program to cover more types of conditions and claims,” which he said “means a greater percentage of claims will be eligible for automated processing, speeding up the process and reducing the workload for claims processors.”

VA is also pushing to fund additional adoption and use of AI capabilities.

The Trump administration’s proposed fiscal year 2027 budget, which was released earlier this month, recommended allocating $130 million to the Veterans Benefits Administration “for automation and artificial intelligence investments modernizing veterans claims processing by reducing errors and delivering benefits to veterans faster.”

An FY27 VA budget document focused on the department’s IT operations also proposed boosting its “Decision Intelligence and Automation” activities to $47.8 million, or $4.7 million more than what was enacted in 2026.

The budget document said that “the increase is driven primarily by the AI Infrastructure solution, enabling VA to pilot and scale AI tools that improve operational efficiency, enhance clinical decision-making, and support personalized care and benefits delivery, while sustaining governance frameworks for safe, effective, and ethical use.”

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How public records requests could help ‘fight AI with AI’

Chris Teale — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:23:52 -0400

ORLANDO, FLORIDA — Receiving and responding to public records requests is a major task for states and localities, but it has gotten even more complex and time-consuming in recent years.

Governments receive thousands of requests a year, and that number is only set to increase as artificial intelligence supplies automated and repeated requests. Meanwhile, the constraints on staff time, including on attorney’s offices, mean the discovery and redaction processes during and at the end of requests take longer, as they trawl through communications and remove any personally identifiable information and other sensitive records.

But experts suggested AI does not just have to bog down efforts to comply with the Freedom of Information Act and similar state and local laws. Instead, it could help process requests, find relevant documents and take a first go at redaction before humans come in to verify its work.

“We need to fight AI with AI a little bit,” said Erica Olsen, co-founder and CEO of government AI platform Madison AI, during the International City/County Management Association’s Local Government Reimagined Conference in Orlando, Florida, last week. In an interview on the sidelines of the conference, she said public records requests remain the “biggest administrative headache for any agency,” in part due to a reluctance to use tech to help reduce the burden.

An effort to use AI for FOIA requests is already somewhat underway at the federal level. Last year, the National Archives and Records Administration found in a report that almost 20% of agencies who responded to the survey said they use the technology or machine learning in processing requests.

But NARA warned that it will not be as simple as letting technology handle the entire FOIA process.

“AI and machine learning have the potential to aid in FOIA processing but are not a substitute for a FOIA professional’s judgment on application of exemptions and foreseeable harm,” the report says. “It is important that agencies explore the use of AI and/or machine learning options to help improve FOIA processing response times.”

One of the biggest obstacles to timely responses to public records requests is the need to manually review records, something that has become more challenging as the definition of a public record has become broader . Now, governments are not just required to produce emails when asked for records, but also other communications like instant messages.

“The opportunity is absolutely to rethink that whole process and instead of engaging the [government’s] technology services team, fetch [records] through a specifically written AI assistant that fetches all the data, the records, emails, evaluating those records [like] a human is doing,” Olsen said in an interview at the ICMA conference. “But AI can do an initial review of that. It can also do an initial review of what needs to be redacted. And then the human in the loop and the district attorney can do the final review.”

AI can also help refine and validate public records requests, especially if they are too broad or need more information. The technology already helps validate information from the public in areas like professional licensing and has helped speed up that process by checking paperwork and asking for more when needed. A similar initiative could help check and modify FOIA requests.

“Most often, those processes fail at some point because the information that was provided by the resident was incorrect, invalid, or somebody did not qualify,” Luke Norris, vice president for platform strategy and transformation at software company Granicus, said during a session at the ICMA conference. “So now AI can actually help us do that. We're effectively using our staff’s time, and they're not reviewing applications that simply would not be compliant, but instead are actually helping that resident fulfill and create and do that work the first time in the right way.”

Some governments have tried to help ease the burden by suggesting governments raise the costs associated with FOIA requests in a bid to reduce their number. Legislation in California would make the fees associated with requests in the state higher, in an effort to discourage nuisance filers. But experts said there must be another way to make it easier on staff.

“One choice is a charge, that's a choice,” Olsen said. “Or the other choice is to figure out how to use tools to meet the service demand from the community without hiring more staff or charging the community. It's either creating equitable access to information, or not.”

In time, AI could totally transform the public records process and make it something close to self-service with requests fulfilled in a matter of hours or days rather than weeks, months or years, Olsen said. But, she added, there is a long road ahead.

“If we really think about where this could go, that is sort of the Holy Grail of a fully transparent government,” Olsen said. “Some folks are quite scared of that. Clearly, we’ve got a way to go. The data is not ready for that yet. But if we think about the big bold vision, that would be the big bold vision, that any city would have their AI solution such that a citizen can ask for anything they needed, information wise.”

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Treasury is creating a database with pandemic aid recipients’ sensitive information

Natalie Alms — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400

The Treasury Department is pooling information about people who received benefits from pandemic-era relief programs in a new, central database it says will be used to conduct program audits.

It’s the latest front in the Trump administration’s efforts to centralize government data, including information typically held by states about people who receive nutrition benefits and jobless aid. Many of the administration’s previous attempts have been subject to lawsuits.

Critics say the department’s required notice for the system is imprecise, overly broad and runs afoul of privacy laws governing the federal government. Treasury is amassing addresses, financial data, Social Security numbers and other data in the new system, which it says it may cross-match with other government data.

Typically, these types of notices are “routine matters that do not warrant comment,” Steve Sharpe, senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, said in a statement. “But the scope of this notice is an astonishing and dramatic departure from prior Treasury practice.”

The NCLC, a nonprofit focused on economic justice, called the new system a “baseless violation of privacy” in a comment on the February notice that it submitted with over 40 other organizations, including many state and local legal aid groups.

Treasury’s plan “could be construed to reach millions of individuals,” the comment reads.

The database will include information about the individuals and entities, like small businesses, receiving benefits from eight department programs, Treasury’s notice says. Congress created many of these during the pandemic to provide emergency relief.

Other programs feeding data into the new system, like one created to rebuild the Gulf Coast after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, have no relation to the pandemic. The new system could also include other programs administered by the Treasury in addition to those listed in the formal filing, the notice says.

Local governments administer some of these programs, and they’re already required to report subrecipient and vendor information, the National League of Cities, the United States Conference of Mayors and National Association of Counties say in a comment, which also emphasizes the cost that reporting new data would entail, especially after some of these programs have been shuttered following the end of the pandemic.

Treasury did not respond to a request for comment. But if it moves forward with the new system as described in the notice, it will be saving information about a long list of people — not only those who receive assistance, but also people “associated” with the nonprofits, small businesses and other entities that received or delivered aid. The system will also house application information, which could include sensitive financial information.

The nonprofit Association of Public Data Users wrote in its comment that the notice “seems designed particularly to obfuscate the purpose of the collection and potential uses of the data.”

Although the stated purpose of the system is for audits, “we suspect the unstated purpose of the system of records is not to audit at all, but to get access to the information held by states that Treasury cannot otherwise directly compel them to submit to the federal government,” continues APDU’s comment, which it submitted with nine other organizations.

The Trump administration has pressured a range of state and local entities to share data with the federal government since the beginning of last year, including voter files.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center argues in its comment, which got sign-on from other organizations like the Center for Democracy and Technology, that the new system runs afoul of the Privacy Act’s principles of minimizing data collection, calling the proposed program “illegal and reckless.”

The notice signals more of the same “data grab playbook” from the administration, John Davisson, litigation director for EPIC, told Nextgov/FCW.

“Time and again we've seen this administration exploit personal data to construct wildly exaggerated narratives of waste and fraud, to carry out brutal immigration enforcement tactics, and attempt to undermine the right to vote,” he said.

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CIA employees will get AI 'coworkers'—and eventually run teams of AI agents, deputy says

David DiMolfetta — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:59:00 -0400

The Central Intelligence Agency aims to integrate artificial intelligence-powered “coworkers” into analysts’ workflows in the coming years as part of an effort to rapidly adopt the emerging capabilities for use in intelligence-gathering and analysis, a top official said Thursday.

CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis said these AI coworkers would be housed in agency analytics platforms to help with basic tasks, though humans would still be looped into the process.

“It won’t do the thinking for our analysts, but it will help draft key judgments, edit for clarity and compare drafts against tradecraft standards,” he said in a speech at a Special Competitive Studies Project event focused on AI and the intelligence community. The AI tools would provide triage assistance and flag trends for human analysts to conduct further review.

Within a decade, the CIA will treat AI tools as an “autonomous mission partner” and officers will manage teams of AI agents in a hybrid model to increase the speed and scale of intelligence work, Ellis added.

Last year, the agency had more than 300 AI projects, and, for the first time in its history, AI was recently used to generate an intelligence report, he said.

The remarks provide a rare public glimpse into how one of the nation’s top spy agencies is integrating frontier AI systems into its day-to-day operations, and they signal that such platforms are expected to become a daily feature of officers’ workflows in the near future.

The CIA primarily executes and coordinates human intelligence gathering overseas, often done undercover. Officers recruit and manage foreign assets to clandestinely gather intelligence on areas like economics, terrorism and cyber threats.

Much of that work often involves the use of technology, though some have recently argued the advent of advanced AI tools may push the CIA more toward old-world tradecraft techniques.

But there have been benefits to technological investments. The agency recently elevated its Center for Cyber Intelligence into an entire mission center, a move that’s “paying dividends already by allowing us to deploy new tools to the field and gain more access to priority targets,” Ellis said.

“The battle of cybersecurity will be a battle of artificial intelligence,” and whoever capitalizes on the best AI models will wield “enormous power,” he added. “Having a new mission center centered around cyber intelligence will put us on the path to secure the upper hand.”

The agency also recently announced a new acquisition framework to overhaul how it integrates technology into its missions.

In an effort to track how foreign adversaries like China are using advanced AI and other technologies, the CIA doubled its technology-related foreign intelligence reporting, said Ellis. Those intelligence products focus on technology use abroad and can include findings on areas like semiconductors, cloud computing, infrastructure, cybersecurity or R&D.

Ellis did not mention Anthropic’s recent Project Glasswing announcement, a consortium announced earlier this week meant to help secure critical software against AI-driven attacks. The project was fueled by a powerful, non-public Anthropic frontier model the company says has already uncovered thousands of vulnerabilities but could be weaponized in the wrong hands.

The intelligence community and its industry partners are already examining and discussing how such a model may impact the future of cyber missions, Nextgov/FCW reported Wednesday.

Earlier this year, Anthropic declined to ease restrictions against its tools being used for domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons for Pentagon use, triggering a “supply chain risk” designation from the Defense Department and a White House order that all federal agencies phase out their uses of Anthropic tools. The company has legally challenged the move.

Ellis did not single out Anthropic specifically, though he cautioned that the CIA “cannot allow the whims of a single company” to constrain its use of AI and said the agency is looking to diversify across multiple vendors to preserve operational freedom.

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VA’s FY27 budget proposal seeks funding for additional AI adoption

Edward Graham — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 08:18:00 -0400

The White House wants to allocate more funds to the Department of Veterans Affairs to help expand the agency’s use of artificial intelligence tools in fiscal year 2027, according to several detailed budget proposals.

The Trump administration released its proposed FY27 budget on Friday, with the VA and other agencies subsequently releasing more detailed breakdowns of their suggested funding levels.

The agency’s funding proposal is unlikely to be enacted by Congress in its current form, as the legislative branch often reworks or fully overhauls White House proposals to meet lawmakers' policy goals, but the document nonetheless provides a window into VA’s priorities for FY27.

The administration is seeking $144.9 billion in discretionary funding for VA in the next fiscal year, with roughly $6.3 billion of that allocated for the agency’s IT systems.

A small — but noticeably growing — portion of these funds are earmarked for AI adoption and expansion.

The budget proposes allocating $130 million to the Veterans Benefits Administration “for automation and artificial intelligence investments modernizing veterans claims processing by reducing errors and delivering benefits to veterans faster.”

VA’s 2025 AI use case inventory listed 367 instances of the agency’s deployment of or experimentation with the emerging capabilities. Of this total, 28 of the uses were focused on improving government benefits processing for veterans and their beneficiaries.

In an FY27 budget document focused on the agency’s IT programs and electronic health record modernization project, VA also proposes earmarking $47.8 million for its “Decision Intelligence and Automation” activities. The budget breakdown says this funding would be for “shared automation and decision support capabilities, including the infrastructure and controls needed to develop, integrate, and govern artificial intelligence capabilities across the Department.”

VA says the boost in proposed funds for these activities — $4.7 million more than what was enacted in 2026, or an increase of around 10.9% — is needed to support additional uses of the emerging capabilities.

“The increase is driven primarily by the AI Infrastructure solution, enabling VA to pilot and scale AI tools that improve operational efficiency, enhance clinical decision-making, and support personalized care and benefits delivery, while sustaining governance frameworks for safe, effective, and ethical use,” the budget says. “The outcome is a secure, scalable AI ecosystem that strengthens decision-making and workflow execution across mission services.”

The agency also says further uses of AI and automated tools would reduce delays and allow VA staff and clinicians to better support veteran care.

According to the budget document, full-time equivalent employees have saved an average of 2-3 hours “through [the use of] generative AI tools at VA,” although it was not clear what timeframe was used to determine this amount. VA also says that 100% of its high-impact AI use cases are in compliance “with federal risk management practices.”

In a topline budget brief, VA says investments in AI would advance its research efforts “by providing a mechanism for directly translating new evidence into practice and pilot testing novel tools and solutions to revolutionize care."

The agency’s overall FY27 budget proposal also allocates $4.2 billion for the continued implementation of its new Oracle Health electronic health record, which is part of a broader federal effort to deploy one common, interoperable system across VA, the Defense Department, the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

VA paused most deployments of the new EHR software in April 2023 to address a host of usability and patient safety issues at the facilities where the system had been rolled out. The agency, however, is preparing to restart go-lives on April 11, with plans to deploy the EHR system at 13 sites in 2026 and then roughly double that amount in 2027.

While the agency is primarily focused right now on resuming the EHR modernization project, the budget proposal also says that efforts to migrate the system to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will help it better adopt AI tools in the future.

“The ability of the Federal EHR to take advantage of artificial intelligence and other capabilities from industry hinges on successfully shifting the system to a cloud infrastructure,” the document reads.

VA’s 2025 AI inventory included five instances of the agency’s Office of Electronic Health Record Modernization — which is spearheading its deployment of the new system — seeking to adopt these capabilities.

This included one use case where the office was identified as being in the pre-deployment phase of rolling out a clinical AI agent into the new system, noting that “administrative tasks, manual documentation, and complex workflows within the Electronic Health Record (EHR) cause lower clinical efficiency and operational effectiveness.”

According to VA’s AI strategy, an updated version of which was released in October, early validation of the agency’s AI use cases will eventually allow them to be “incorporated into the EHR and many other information technology platforms through coordination between innovators and the teams managing those systems today.”

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Agencies could be required to move loan systems to 1 platform under bipartisan bill

Doug Criscitello — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Bipartisan legislation introduced in March 2026 would consolidate federal lending systems onto a shared services platform, a move that would require agencies to migrate their loan programs or justify exemptions under the Federal Loan Systems Modernization Act (H.R. 7789 and S. 3980).

According to the bill's main sponsor Sen. Marsha Blackburn. R-Tenn., outdated systems have cost billions and allowed tens of billions in fraud, and modernizing federal lending through Lending.gov will help make government more user-friendly, combat fraud and save taxpayer dollars.

The policy goal is clear, but the success of the effort will depend heavily on execution, a factor that has challenged similar governmentwide IT initiatives in the past.

For federal managers overseeing lending programs, the bill raises operational questions: Who would run this platform? How would migration work? And what happens to existing contracts and staff? Those questions would be addressed in a report to Congress required within six months of the bill’s enactment.

How Would Credit Agencies Be Impacted?

While federal credit agencies would retain policy authority and program discretion, they would be required to begin speaking the same language and using common technology with a goal of establishing consistent standards for loan management and an improved user experience for borrowers.

That shift would mark a structural change in how federal lending is administered, moving from agency-specific systems to a more centralized, shared infrastructure model.

In practice, this means agencies currently running loan programs on legacy systems would face a choice: migrate to the platform or demonstrate clearly why their program requires standalone infrastructure. The six-month GSA implementation plan, which would necessarily follow substantial input and direction from the Office of Management and Budget, must detail which programs integrate first and set migration timelines.

The scope is substantial. The government’s $5 trillion loan portfolio spans 20 agencies who lend to students, small businesses, homeowners, rural communities, and American business interests in emerging markets. Many credit agencies have spent decades building custom underwriting systems and servicing platforms. They are badly in need of modernization. Unwinding them, though, will be no small feat.

The Ownership Question

The legislation doesn't specify which agency or entity would own and operate Lending.gov. The most likely candidates are GSA, the Department of the Treasury, or perhaps a current credit agency like the Small Business Administration. GSA has established shared services expertise through initiatives like Login.gov to achieve efficiencies across the government.

Treasury has deep experience with financial systems and already operates Pay.gov, which allows agencies to collect electronic payments through a single platform rather than having each agency maintain a payment processing capability. Treasury has also recently taken on new responsibilities involving student loan servicing. The department’s new role helping to service loans will generate critical data (e.g., migration costs, staffing requirements, systems integration challenges, borrower satisfaction metrics) that can inform efforts to implement Lending.gov.

The SBA offers another option. An overhaul of the platform used to extend credit to victims recovering from natural disasters has substantially improved the agency’s capabilities around loan making, fraud control, and servicing.

Migration Realities and Resistance Points

Not all loan programs are equally ready for migration. The implementation plan will need to address transition costs, contract buyouts, and how to avoid service disruptions during migration. Terminating and replacing major IT contracts before they expire typically incurs significant costs, and some agencies may face vendor litigation.

Staffing presents another challenge. Agencies currently employ specialists who manage legacy lending systems. If those systems migrate to a shared platform, what happens to that expertise? Some staff might transfer to the new platform operator; others might be retrained; some positions might be eliminated.

Centralizing lending infrastructure also introduces new risks. A single platform could create a larger target for cyber threats or a single point of operational failure. Programs with statutory or market-specific requirements may struggle to fit standardized workflows, increasing the likelihood of exceptions that could undercut the platform’s intended efficiencies.

The Coordination Challenge

The bill faces the fundamental challenge that has defeated previous consolidation efforts: agencies protect their autonomy, and congressional committees protect their turf.

Without strong alignment among agencies, Congress and central authorities like OMB, similar efforts have historically stalled or resulted in partial adoption rather than full transformation.

Twenty agencies managing loan programs means twenty sets of stakeholders who currently control how lending operations work. A shared services platform centralizes decisions that those stakeholders currently make independently. Agencies will argue their programs have unique requirements that a shared platform can't accommodate. They'll point to recent investments and question why those should be abandoned.

Congressional committees span a wide range of interests from the House and Senate Agriculture committees (which oversee USDA lending), the Small Business committees, and the Banking committees. A shared platform run by an agency outside of their purview shifts some oversight authority. The legislation, however, preserves lending agency authority over credit policy, underwriting standards, and program rules—matters typically of greatest concern to the committees.

Technology Procurement in the Meantime

One factor adding urgency: agencies continue to procure new technology for lending operations, and without coordination, they risk locking in another generation of incompatibility.

Banks are projected to spend $85 billion on AI systems by 2030, according to Juniper Research. Federal agencies are expected to follow that trend, each independently procuring AI tools for underwriting, fraud detection, and servicing. If agencies spend the next several years independently buying and deploying AI tools before Lending.gov is operational, the integration challenge becomes significantly harder.

GAO's 2025 annual report on duplication found that addressing recommendations on duplicative IT investments could save the government over $100 billion. Uncoordinated technology procurement in the lending space directly contributes to that duplication.

Lessons from Other Consolidations

The adoption of shared services is nothing new. Payroll consolidation, in the mid-2000s, reduced payroll providers from 22 to four. That initiative worked because OMB strongly supported the move and the function was already relatively standardized across agencies.

The ongoing consolidation of agency data centers shows the challenge of mandates without resources. Agencies were required to close data centers and move to shared infrastructure, but many lacked funding for migration. The result: slower progress than planned, and agencies keeping old data centers running longer than intended.

For Lending.gov, the lessons suggest that there must be a clear value proposition for agencies, adequate funding for transition costs, flexibility in migration timing, and strong central authority (such as OMB) to enforce standards and resolve disputes.

What This Means for Federal Managers

For agency staff currently working on lending programs, the key question is: if the bill becomes law, what should we do or not do?

At a minimum, agencies should maintain current systems while preparing for the possibility of migration and avoiding long-term investments that could conflict with a centralized platform model.

Agencies planning significant system upgrades should engage with OMB and the bill's sponsors to understand likely platform directions before committing to long-term contracts.

The six-month implementation plan will be the first real test of whether the proposal can move from concept to execution, and how disruptive the transition is likely to be for agencies.

Doug Criscitello is the executive director of the Center for USA Lending, a nonpartisan organization which advances modern design and delivery of federal credit programs.

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The IRS wants to shrink its workforce by nearly 4,000 — and use technology to make up the difference

Natalie Alms — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:39:37 -0400

The IRS has pushed out more than 28,000 employees since Trump’s inauguration. Now, it wants to lose another net 4,000 staff, according to new IRS budget documents.

The tax agency is banking on technology improvements to help it sustain performance at its lower headcount, it says in its fiscal year 2027 budget justification.

“Without modernization, the IRS would be unable to sustain performance with a reduced headcount,” the budget document says. The agency’s modernization budget “represents a prudent and necessary investment to sustain performance, enable future workforce efficiencies, and deliver enduring value to taxpayers and the Nation.”

The IRS estimates that staffing reductions of 4,875 employees will yield “significant savings” of over $777 million. The IRS budget doesn’t specify where or how these cuts would take place, and the IRS and Treasury Department did not respond to requests for comment. Overall, the administration has proposed a $1.4 billion reduction in IRS funding.

Even as the IRS says that it’s relying on technology to make up for a smaller staff size, its technology shop hasn’t been immune to staffing losses. The IRS has shed about 40% of its IT staff, according to Federal News Network, and 80% of its executives. The agency also reassigned 1,500 employees from its IT shop to the office of the chief operating officer last year.

AI “will be part of speeding up everything we’re doing,” Frank Bisignano, the IRS CEO, told lawmakers last month. “We are building an IRS that leverages advanced technology, empowers its workforce with better tools and delivers secure and easily accessible services.”

But Congress’ watchdog warned recently that staffing losses at the IRS have left skill gaps in AI areas that increase the risk that the agency’s AI efforts “will not succeed.”

The agency’s research, applied analytics and statistics unit — one of two main AI hubs at the IRS, helmed by the agency’s AI lead — lost 63 employees who supported the agency’s AI efforts as of May last year.

IT staff at the IRS have also been among those moved to work as tax examiners and contact representatives after the IRS failed to fully staff its divisions tasked with tax processing and customer service in the lead-up to the filing season.

The IRS is also proposing some hires in the new budget request.

The tax agency wants to hire 1,132 employees to “maintain customer service” to help implement the administration’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” and staff its telephone line, according to the budget, which also previews a push for more online, self-service options for taxpayers so that they don’t have to rely on “assisted channels” in the first place.

This isn’t the first push to make up for staffing losses at the IRS since Trump took office. Last summer, the agency pivoted away from planned layoffs to hiring and reassignments to fill “mission critical skill sets.”

Danny Werfel, who served as IRS commissioner during the Biden administration, told Nextgov/FCW in a statement that “the most important next step is for the IRS to publish a detailed modernization plan that gives the public clear visibility into its technology priorities, timelines, and expected outcomes.”

“The plan should help make clear how, when, and at what budget, the IRS will make up for staffing reductions that may be impeding their stated objective to improve customer service, collections, and data security,” he continued.

That plan appears to be in flux as the IRS anticipates using up the last of its funding from the Inflation Reduction Act in fiscal 2028. Passed in 2022, the law originally gave the IRS almost $80 billion, although $54 billion of that has been rescinded by lawmakers. The IRS was using some of the funding for technology improvements, and now the IRS is re-evaluating its modernization plans as it anticipates the money running dry, the budget says.

Among the work that the IRS had been doing with IRA funding is trying to modernize some of its systems that date back to the 1960s. It appears that that effort is ongoing, as the IRS budget includes a push to modernize its mainframe tax processing systems that are built on over 15 million lines of COBOL, a legacy computer language that fewer programmers are now proficient in.

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Cuts hit CISA, NIST and IRS in Trump’s FY27 budget

Alexandra Kelley, Edward Graham, and David DiMolfetta — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 06:00:00 -0400

President Donald Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget is out, laying out the administration’s priorities but setting up a proposal that is likely to change significantly as it moves through Congress toward final approval.

Our sister publication Nextgov/FCW breaks down the major highlights below:

Cybersecurity

The proposed budget sheds around $707 million from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The move mirrors efforts last year to draw down resources from the nation’s main civilian cyberdefense bureau that is located in the Department of Homeland Security. CISA has drawn the ire of the president and many of his allies over past activities tied to election security.

A cut of this size would mark a sharp escalation from the prior year’s budget fight, when the White House sought roughly $490 million in reductions — about 16% of the agency’s initial $3 billion budget — but ultimately faced congressional resistance that brought proposed cuts closer to a range of $130 million to $300 million. If enacted, the FY27 proposal would deepen the reductions by more than $200 million compared to the administration’s earlier request, signaling a continued push to significantly scale back the agency’s footprint.

“CISA was more focused on censorship than on protecting the nation’s critical systems, and put them at risk due to poor management and inefficiency, as well as a focus on self-promotion” the FY27 document says.

It adds that the budget would remove “duplicative” programs focused on state and local cyber funding. Notably, it proposes eliminating programs “focused on so-called misinformation and propaganda as well as external engagement offices such as council management, stakeholder engagement, and international affairs.”

Those offices were targets of frequent workforce reductions in CISA over the last year. The proposal’s call to eliminate stakeholder engagement functions could have far-reaching effects, as those offices serve as a primary conduit between the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and state, local and private-sector partners that own or operate much of the nation’s critical infrastructure.

“Like the President’s cyber strategy, the President’s CISA budget reflects his utter lack of understanding of the urgency of the cyber threats we face and how to mobilize the government to help confront them. As of 2023, CISA was spending $2 million on countering information operations, an effort initially launched at the behest of Congressional Republicans during the first Trump Administration,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee.

“There is nothing that justifies a reckless $700 million cut to CISA, particularly at a time of heightened tensions with Iran and an increasingly aggressive China,” he added. “I am committed to working with my colleagues to push back against these cuts and ensure we can protect government and critical infrastructure networks.”

Despite the cuts to CISA, the budget adds funding to other cyber components of the government. The Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence would get a $15.2 million infusion for “key investments in critical cyber capabilities, sanctions targeting, and combating illicit financial activity,” it says. Treasury often sanctions nation-state hackers and cybercriminals when the U.S. government makes a determination that their activity poses a national security threat.

An allocation of $403 million under the Transportation Department would go to support a Trump 2.0 executive order concentrating on the nation's capital and contribute to enhancing the visibility of law enforcement within the D.C. Metro system. Funding is specifically earmarked for improvements such as upgrading camera and monitoring systems and implementing cybersecurity enhancements.

Emerging Tech

Major emerging technologies, specifically artificial intelligence and quantum information and computing sciences, were broadly spared from major cuts, with the administration writing “The Budget maintains funding for research in artificial intelligence and quantum information science at key agencies, to ensure the United States remains on the cutting edge of these critical technologies’ development and responsible use.”

AI received a $1.2 billion investment across the Department of Energy apparatus, with a focus on how it can improve energy systems. The new funding will also go towards supporting seven AI supercomputers at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories. At the defense level, the budget also prioritizes AI in defense systems and within the Armed Forces enterprise.

The National Nuclear Security Administration would receive $32.8 billion — an increase of 12% over the previous year — to foster new nuclear capabilities and deterrents in a bid to strengthen American energy dominance.

Several of the budget’s proposed cuts support the Trump administration’s effort to eliminate “wokeness” from government operations, government-funded programs and AI systems used in federal operations. The document highlighted a Baltimore, Maryland-based health AI tool funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to help 15- to 25-year-olds “optimize their sexual health decision making” as an example of such programs that would be slashed.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology also suffered cuts of $993 million under the proposed budget to reduce “wasteful spending at NIST that has long funded awards for the development of curricula that advance a radical climate agenda.”

Among the cut programs, the budget completely eliminates the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, saying it has failed to accelerate the U.S.-based manufacturer’s ability to compete globally. This follows the nominee for NIST director Arvind Raman’s March testimony before the Senate Commerce committee vocalizing his support for the MEP program.

VA modernization

The White House’s proposed budget would allocate $4.2 billion for the continued rollout of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ new electronic health record system. The modernization initiative, which was paused in April 2023 to address technical and safety issues at the VA medical facilities where the software had been deployed, is set to resume on April 11. The agency plans to deploy the Oracle Health EHR system at 13 sites in 2026, with the goal of roughly doubling the number of go-lives in 2027.

Friday’s budget document said the Trump administration has made accelerating deployments of the modernized system “a top priority effort.”

The agency’s FY26 budget directed $3.4 billion toward VA’s EHR modernization project, although Congress included a provision in the funding measure that made 30% of those funds contingent upon the agency providing “an updated life-cycle cost for the program, a facility-by-facility deployment schedule, certification on healthcare performance baseline metrics for facilities where the EHR has already been deployed, projected staffing levels necessary to support the schedule proposed, and the certification of four safe successful deployments without any adverse events.”

More broadly, the proposed FY27 budget for VA also looks to enhance the agency’s adoption and use of new capabilities and modernized software systems.

The request calls for $130 million to be allocated to the Veterans Benefits Administration “for automation and artificial intelligence investments modernizing veterans claims processing by reducing errors and delivering benefits to veterans faster.”

VA’s 2025 AI use case inventory, which was released in January, listed 367 instances of the agency’s exploration and adoption of the capabilities, and 28 of the uses were focused on government benefits processing.

The proposed budget said adoption of these benefits-focused uses — the majority of which were listed in the recent inventory as still being in pre-deployment — will “limit the costly practice of relying on surge staffing and extra labor costs while using taxpayer dollars more efficiently.”

Additionally, the Trump administration’s proposal would direct $6.3 billion toward VA’s IT systems, which it said would allow the agency “to accelerate cybersecurity efforts, continue implementation of a modern integrated financial and acquisition system, support EHRM rollout, and strengthen digital platforms for mental health, community care, and housing to ensure timely, reliable access to benefits.”

IRS customer experience

Citing concerns about alleged agency bloat and privacy violations, the administration’s proposal suggests cutting $1.4 billion from the tax agency’s previously allocated FY26 budget.

It says, however, that the White House “proposes to streamline IRS operations utilizing technology improvements to help focus the IRS on providing high-quality customer service while ensuring the tax laws are fairly administered.”

While the document is vague on how this new technology would be used, the administration does cite its previous effort to eliminate the agency’s Direct File program, which allowed taxpayers to file their returns online directly with the IRS, as an example of wasteful spending. It said the program “cost over $41 million but yielded fewer than 300,000 IRS-accepted returns for tax year 2024—a cost of nearly $140 per return, when existing programs allow many taxpayers to file for free.”

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Old-school spycraft could make a comeback as AI undermines trust

David DiMolfetta — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 07:03:00 -0400

Artificial intelligence is widely expected to revolutionize intelligence gathering, enabling faster, cheaper and more scalable collection of information. But a new analysis suggests the technology may also spur a return to some of espionage’s oldest methods.

The recent article published in Studies in Intelligence, the CIA-backed academic journal, argues that, as AI degrades the reliability of digital communications like text messages and video calls, traditional human intelligence tradecraft — like dead drops, brush passes and in-person meetings — could regain renewed importance.

The same technologies that enhance intelligence gathering may ironically make it harder to trust the data those tools produce or transmit, argues the author, Thomas Mulligan, a RAND Corporation researcher who served in the CIA from 2008 to 2014.

AI is already being used to generate convincing deepfakes and fabricate messages. These tools, his paper argues, introduce a new source of “noise” into digital communications, which he says is making it harder to distinguish between authentic and synthetic signals.

That erosion has implications for how spies communicate with their sources.

“If my friend tells me, face-to-face, that he is in trouble and needs money, I can be confident that that’s true,” Mulligan writes. But when the same message is delivered through an electronic medium, it becomes “more likely a scam than a bona fide plea for help.”

That dynamic elevates the value of communication methods that are not mediated through electronic means.

A properly executed dead drop, for instance, allows an intelligence officer to securely receive information while also verifying that it came from a specific human source, rather than an AI-generated deception, he says. A dead drop involves a secret location used to exchange information or physical items between people without requiring them to meet face-to-face.

The same logic applies to brief, in-person exchanges like brush passes, in which spies and sources pass materials to one another during a quick, seemingly routine encounter in public.

The argument runs counter to assumptions that advances in AI will diminish the role of human intelligence, or HUMINT, in favor of more technical collection methods.

Long before the advent of spy satellites and tailored computer hacking kits, human intelligence dominated espionage as the world’s oldest form of spying. From royal couriers and informants in the Persian Empire carrying sensitive information across imperial networks to the Culper Spy Ring’s use of invisible ink and dead drops during the American Revolutionary War, intelligence once solely moved through people.

In recent months, the Trump administration has made it a point to highlight contributions that CIA operatives have made toward its national security achievements, including efforts targeting the government of ousted Venezuela leader Nicolás Maduro. The agency has also taken a more public-facing posture, releasing recruitment videos aimed at sourcing in China. And in the months leading up to the Iran war, agency spies had been reportedly tracking the movements of now deceased Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

At any given time, the CIA, the nation’s primary human intelligence agency, may be operating across dozens of countries worldwide to collect foreign intelligence or conduct covert action — activities intended to influence political, economic or security conditions abroad, while concealing the U.S. government’s role.

Mulligan’s paper also comes as the tech industry has pushed for AI adoption across government agencies, including offices focused on national security and intelligence. In February, the CIA announced a major overhaul of its technology procurement process, as part of an effort to more quickly adopt leading-edge capabilities for use in its missions.

In a phone interview, Mulligan said AI may play a more permanent role in helping human spies craft better-sounding communications, just as cyber experts have argued that AI tools greatly enhance and scale bad actors’ phishing campaigns.

“A core part of being a case officer and human intelligence operations is persuasion, talking to a prospective agent or a recruited agent and trying to convince him or her to do things that can be difficult, can be dangerous and can be stressful,” he said. “I think AI has a constructive role to play, from the point of view of a case officer, in enhancing his or her ability to persuade.”

But there’s a prevailing question about how much intelligence practitioners risk when they outsource tasks to AI. Gathering intelligence from other people “is a human business at the end of the day, and it does involve an agent and a case officer as a team engaging in a difficult and sometimes dangerous relationship,” Mulligan said.

“My view,” he added, “is that [HUMINT] will have to have a human element — a real, essential human element — for the foreseeable future.”

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Social Security delays launch of centralized claims system amid staff anxiety

Natalie Alms — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 15:00:00 -0400

The Social Security Administration is delaying its rollout of new systems to centralize claims processing and appointment scheduling and pivoting to a pilot approach, according to internal emails obtained by Nextgov/FCW.

SSA had intended to debut these new systems early this month. They were expected to be a major shift in how the agency operates, moving from processing claims locally to a national system.

The optics of such a change factored into SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano’s decision to delay the rollout of the new systems — “particularly where customers may expect access to their local office,” read an internal email sent Monday.

It also outlined the importance of the agency moving slowly to make sure the effects on customer experience are fully understood before the National Appointment Scheduling Calendar and National Workload Management system are implemented broadly. Bisignano had touted the plans as coming improvements to staff just last week in an internal email.

The new case management system was going to centralize claims processing by replacing local workload systems with a centralized system that automatically would distribute work from a nation-wide pool to the next available technician based on their availability and skillset, according to an internal document viewed by Nextgov/FCW.

The move from claims processing happening locally to nationally had caused anxiety among SSA staff about the future of field offices, especially given that SSA is aiming to drastically cut down the number of people it receives for appointments in its field offices, as Nextgov/FCW has previously reported.

The changes also presented logistical challenges, like how to deal with state-specific rules if claims were going to be distributed to employees centrally, instead of handled geographically.

SSA was still working out the kinks just weeks before the systems were to debut. An internal FAQ, dated March 24, stated that a process to handle how to transfer physical documentation for a claim in a field office other than the one handling the claim was still being worked out.

The scheduling system was intended to shift appointment scheduling to a national system, too, offering appointments to customers based on national availability, not the availability of local field offices.

It was meant to allow customers to schedule initial claim phone appointments online, as well as change how employees scheduled appointments on their end. Eventually, the goal is for the system to become the central scheduling tool for the agency, although the rollout was set to start with scheduling initial claim phone appointments only.

SSA said that these changes would better match up workloads with open capacity, improve appointment timeliness and allow the agency to see workloads centrally.

The decision to pilot the changes will allow the agency to test if the expected efficiencies are realized and “ensure we maintain customer confidence” before a wider launch, the email announcing the change said. Details on the pilot are forthcoming, it said, after the agency has spent months preparing for the national rollout.

An SSA spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW that the implementation of internal-facing technology would start this year.

“Customers will not notice any changes aside from expanded appointment availability. Field offices are, and will always remain, our front-line, serving the more than 330 million Americans with Social Security numbers,” they said.

“This is one of the digital-first changes we are implementing that will empower field office staff to focus on what they do best, resolving customers’ needs in-person with care, accuracy, and efficiency, while directing more complex cases and time-intensive tasks to specialized teams in a centralized environment,” they continued. “Leveraging our national scale, improved workflows, and modern technology, SSA continues to focus our strategy and goals to match our customers’ evolving service preferences.”

Although centralizing and standardizing work at SSA had potential advantages, it likely wouldn’t make up for the staffing shortages the agency is dealing with after losing over 7,000 employees last year, Kathleen Romig, director of social security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, previously told Nextgov/FCW.

The day after the agency announced the change, its chief of field operations, Andy Sriubas, was replaced by Tom Holland, who had been serving as the agency’s chief financial officer. Sriubas is now in a new role as the chief of strategy and marketing. Sean Brune, who has long worked at SSA in technology leadership roles, is now SSA’s chief financial officer.

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IRS’ move away from paper checks has delayed tax refunds for nearly 1.5 million Americans

Natalie Alms — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 07:00:00 -0400

More than one million taxpayers are facing weeks-long delays in receiving their tax refunds due to IRS efforts to wean the government off paper checks.

The tax agency announced earlier this year that, at the direction of a March executive order, it is phasing out paper checks and pushing taxpayers to use direct deposit to receive their refunds, with limited exceptions.

Paper checks have increasingly been vulnerable to fraud, and the federal government says that electronic payments are faster and cheaper.

Although most taxpayers already use direct deposit to get their refunds, millions of Americans still asked for a check from the IRS last tax year.

So far, the IRS has sent notices to nearly 1.5 million taxpayers asking them to add information for direct deposit or another form of electronic payment like a payment app, according to Reps. Danny Davis, D-Ill., and Terri Sewell, D-Ala., who have been pressing the IRS for information on the process. These taxpayers are facing potential refund delays of over two months.

Taxpayers who receive these notices from the IRS asking for direct deposit information have 30 days to provide bank account information, which requires taxpayers to pass identity checks powered by facial recognition to make an online account with the IRS. If the agency doesn’t hear back, it will issue a paper check six weeks later, meaning the delay can be over two months long. The IRS didn’t respond to a request for comment.

For low-income households, tax refunds can be a critical source of income. Most Americans have a bank account, but 5.6 million households were unbanked as of 2023. That rate is higher among low-income adults, as well as younger people, Black and Hispanic adults and people with disabilities. Rural and tribal communities lacking internet access and living far from bank branches, as well as elderly taxpayers, may also especially feel the government’s push to direct deposit.

People can also ask the IRS for exceptions from the electronic payment requirement, although the tax agency has not provided much information online about the exemption process, like who qualifies.

“There is no simple process for these taxpayers to request an immediate release of their refund by paper check without waiting at least 10 weeks,” Davis and Sewell wrote in a March 9 letter.

Last week, they followed up on their request for more materials from the IRS, saying that the tax agency had not given them the information they’d asked for, including a copy of the notice being sent to taxpayers who filed without bank information. The IRS sent an altered version, something the lawmakers called “an example of this administration trying to muddle information provided to Congress.”

The pair also wants the IRS to shorten its processing timeframes for those being sent the notice and to provide them with options other than the online IRS account to find a remedy. The phone number offered by the IRS on the notice doesn’t put callers in touch with a live agent, but instead connects callers with a recording telling them to set up an online account.

Other government agencies are also moving away from paper checks. Over the summer, the Social Security Administration warned claimants still receiving their benefits via paper checks that their payments could be disrupted.

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Pro-Iran hackers say they breached the FBI director’s email and posted contents online

David DiMolfetta — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 13:08:00 -0400

A pro-Iran hacker group claimed to have accessed FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email and posted purported contents from the inbox online.

Handala, which claimed responsibility in recent weeks for hacks against Stryker and Lockheed Martin in response to the Iran war, circulated images and documents online that they claimed to be from Patel’s email account. Many images include pictures of Patel in a personal capacity before becoming FBI director.

The leaks appear to be authentic, according to a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to publicly discuss details of the breach.

The incident was first reported by Reuters.

“The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information, and we have taken all necessary steps to mitigate potential risks associated with this activity. The information in question is historical in nature and involves no government information,” the bureau said in a statement after this story published.

Handala said it carried out the intrusion after the FBI last week said it seized domains used by the group.

“Today, once again, the world witnessed the collapse of America’s so-called security legends,” the group wrote on its website. “While the FBI proudly seized our domains and immediately announced a $10 million reward for the heads of Handala Hack members, we decided to respond to this ridiculous show in a way that will be remembered forever.”

The breach is likely legitimate, according to a former U.S. official who said that administration officials’ personal email accounts are a frequent target of Iranian hackers.

It would not be the first time that Iran-aligned hackers executed a “hack and leak” operation against U.S. targets. In 2024, the Trump campaign was accessed in an Iranian hack that exposed vetting documents for Vice President JD Vance.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include remarks from a former U.S. official and the FBI.

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Trump names CEOs, nuclear fusion founders and Nobel laureate to tech advisory council

Alexandra Kelley — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:54:01 -0400

Leadership from Big Tech is further cementing its presence in Washington as the White House unveiled the first 13 members that will compose the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Pursuant to an executive order President Donald Trump signed shortly after taking office, the PCAST is intended to advise the president and other administration officials on crafting the most accurate and comprehensive tech policy consistent with the administration’s goals. The inaugural members, unveiled on Wednesday, include several major tech company leaders, including NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Most of the new members work at the c-level of major tech companies: Sergey Brin, who cofounded Google alongside Larry Page in 1998 and now serves as a board member for Google parent company Alphabet; Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell; Oracle CEO Safra Catz; Oracle Co-Founder, former CEO and current Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison; and Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su.

Leaders in venture capital and investment are also prevalent, such as Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Marc Andreessen; Coinbase cryptocurrency Co-Founder Fred Ehrsam; and entrepreneur David Friedberg.

Jacob DeWitte and Bob Mumgaard represent the fusion energy industry as CEOs of Oklo, Inc. and Commonwealth Fusion Systems, respectively.

Academia also has a voice via John Martinis, a physics professor at the University of California and a 2025 Nobel Laureate in physics.

“Under President Trump, PCAST will focus on topics related to the opportunities and challenges that emerging technologies present to the American workforce, and ensuring all Americans thrive in the Golden Age of Innovation,” the press release reads. The executive order stipulates that PCAST can include up to 24 members, leaving the option of an additional 11 to be announced later, a move the White House says will come soon.

The press release also noted that the council will be co-chaired by AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios

Notably absent from the list is billionaire Elon Musk, who spent a significant amount of time on the 2024 campaign trail with Trump and briefly served as a special government employee setting up the Department of Government Efficiency.

The second Trump administration has consistently courted major tech companies for ambitious projects, striking new partnerships to continue to push U.S. technology to the global forefront.

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IRS faces AI skills gaps after pushing tech talent out, watchdog finds

Natalie Alms — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:44:00 -0400

The IRS wants to deploy artificial intelligence, but workforce reductions that hit tech teams mean the agency has capacity gaps that could impact its ability to do so, according to a new report from Congress’ watchdog, the Government Accountability Office.

As the Trump administration sought to downsize the federal government last year, it pushed out nearly 20,000 technology, data and telecommunications employees.

The IRS shed about 40% of its IT staff and lost about 80% of its executives last year, the agency's chief information officer said last month, potentially complicating its modernization goals.

After ousting dozens of staff charged with designing, implementing and overseeing AI, the tax agency has gaps in necessary AI skills that officials say could be hard to close. The IRS also doesn’t have a plan to fix the problem, GAO says.

Some staff retired or resigned. The agency placed others on administrative leave. Last March, the tax agency put its IT shop’s head of AI on administrative leave, along with about 50 other IT executives.

The IRS also fired generative AI experts that were still in their probationary period last spring. As in other agencies, these new hires were early targets for removals last year because they have weaker protections than tenured civil servants.

Some workers have since returned to the agency, but many of those have been reassigned to other work at the IRS because of attrition that created gaps elsewhere.

In August, Nextgov/FCW reported that the IRS was abandoning planned layoffs and looking to rehire staff to fill gaps in “mission critical expertise.”

Three-quarters of the staff on the AI governance team at the IRS have also left. The agency’s AI team, overseen by the chief technology officer, had lost half of its staff by May 2025, before the office itself was disbanded.

Some of the tax agency’s AI deployments may have to stop because of these staffing constraints, GAO says — despite the Trump administration’s pro-AI stance and efforts to push the use of the technology across the government. The watchdog noted that the IRS also risks deploying AI systems without the resources to make sure that the technology is used responsibly.

One IRS official told GAO that the IRS may no longer use an AI model focused on prioritizing tax returns for audit, because the program may no longer have the staff to conduct the audits.

With fewer enforcement staff, and therefore fewer audits, the IRS will have less data on audit outcomes to train new AI models or retune their existing ones.

“Without quality AI models, IRS officials said the agency may have diminished capability to improve IRS’s ability to collect revenue and reduce the number of audits that do not result in a tax change,” GAO wrote.

The watchdog recommended that the IRS develop a plan to address skills gaps, which the agency agreed with, although GAO says the tax agency doesn’t yet have a plan in place to fix the problem.

The IRS is also currently under a hiring freeze, and officials told GAO that open jobs will be hard to fill because of the nature of the terminations, in-office work requirements and terminated individuals finding other jobs.

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White House releases regulatory vision for AI

Alexandra Kelley — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:48:27 -0400

The White House unveiled a new artificial intelligence policy framework on Friday that features seven guiding recommendations to support the administration’s policy recommendations for Congress.

The National Policy Framework for AI’s seven pillars are Protecting Children and Empowering Parents; Safeguarding and Strengthening American Communities; Respecting Intellectual Property Rights and Creators; Preventing Censorship and Protecting Free Speech; Enabling Innovation and Ensuring American AI Dominance; Educating Americans and Developing an AI-ready Workforce; and Establishing a Federal Policy Framework Preempting Cumbersome State Laws.

Policy details within each pillar aim to balance citizen protections — such as eliminating child user data collection, augmenting parental safety controls, ensuring ratepayers aren’t burdened with high utility costs and providing tax breaks for AI adoption in small businesses — with ensuring the U.S. isn’t hindered in advancing AI technologies. For example, while ratepayers — those who pay fees to utility providers — are protected, the framework dictates that permitting reform needs to be undertaken to scale more data centers.

The intense energy demands that AI-supporting data centers have can increase electricity prices for nearby residents unless offsets are made. President Donald Trump announced in his Feb. 25 State of the Union address that he had established an agreement with major tech companies to absorb the surges in energy costs themselves.

Copyright law and creator protections work to thread a similar needle. While the framework recommends that Congress set legislation that protects creators’ voices and likenesses, the administration also acknowledged that its core belief is that AI scraping the internet for copyrighted material is not a violation of U.S. copyright law. The framework further says the U.S. court system has the final say in if an AI developer violates fair use laws.

Regarding copyright law, the administration also suggests that Congress develop enabling licensing laws or a mechanism for collective rights holders to be able to negotiate compensation for their likeness or content being used in AI.

The framework also features a return of White House calls for state AI law preemption. The Trump administration asks Congress to protect the U.S. AI advantage by rejecting state laws that are deemed “undue burdens.”

Simultaneously, the framework notes that state law preemption will not apply to how states want to use AI technology or in areas where states are uniquely suited to govern certain subject matters.

“Preemption must ensure that State laws do not govern areas better suited to the Federal Government or act contrary to the United States’ national strategy to achieve global AI dominance,” the framework reads.

The final three pillars — workforce development, ensuring innovation and free speech protection — are mired in controversy. The framework says the broad U.S. workforce needs to learn a level of AI-fluency, and asks Congress to support non-regulatory methods to expand existing education programs that foster AI education.

Experimental and isolated sandboxes are also highlighted as a priority area in the framework, which recommends that Congress establish regulatory sandboxes for AI applications to help spur software testing and development.

It also supports Congress providing resources that allow industry and academic partners access to federal datasets for further AI model training. Notably, the framework says Congress should not create any new federal rulemaking body to regulate AI and instead maintain a “sector-specific” approach with existing regulatory bodies.

In keeping with protecting free speech against AI products deemed “biased,” the framework also recommends Congress prevent federal agencies from using “coercing technology providers” that operate their technology upon “ideological agendas.”

Such a recommendation follows Trump’s sweeping Feb. 27 demand that all federal agencies remove Anthropic products from their operations, after the AI company refused to allow the Pentagon to use Claude for missions involving mass surveillance of Americans or to guide autonomous weapons

The framework also asks Congress to provide recourse for Americans to report censorship activity on or within AI platforms.

The same morning the framework was released, Republican members of the House swiftly vocalized their support, with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Reps. Steve Scalise, R-La., Brian Babin, R-Texas, Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, issuing a statement pledging to follow the framework’s suggestions.

“House Republicans look forward to working across the aisle to enact a national framework that unleashes the full potential of AI, cements the U.S. as the global leader, and provides important protections for American families,” the press release reads.

Reactions to the framework outside the federal government were more mixed. The Business Software Alliance said it “welcomes” the framework, underscoring its emphasis on developing an AI-ready workforce, liberating select data for AI training and advancing AI adoption.

“The Framework helps catalyze a needed conversation in Washington, grounded in the reality that building trust in AI and enabling its broad adoption requires clear, workable national rules for the United States.”

Online business industry group NetChoice also said it supports the adoption of the framework.

“The Trump administration understands that it was a light-touch regulatory environment, not 50 different confusing and conflicting regulatory regimes, that enabled the internet revolution and that innovation and investment in winning the AI future for America will require a similar approach,” Patrick Hedger, NetChoice director of policy said.

Alternatively, AI watchdog organizations like Americans for Responsible Innovation argued the framework shields AI developers from liability.

“After witnessing the harmful impact of the tech industry’s move-fast-break-things mantra during the rise of social media platforms, the public wants safeguards now,” ARI President Brad Carson said. “What’s most disturbing is that the framework recommends both banning state laws on AI and urges Congress not to create new ‘open-ended’ liability for the AI industry when it comes to child harms. For the AI industry, that means open season on the American public.”

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Congress reauthorized the Technology Modernization Fund through the fiscal year. Why that matters and what’s next

Jessie Posilkin — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:25:49 -0400

Congress recently reauthorized the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) through Sept. 30, 2026, enabling the TMF board to continue selecting the strongest proposals and recommending funding where it will deliver the greatest impact.

National competitiveness, security, and effective service delivery depend on sustained federal technology modernization. This extension cannot be the final one. Reauthorization beyond this fiscal year allows the TMF to function as a true revolving fund, with agencies repaying their investments so those same dollars can fund additional modernization efforts without requiring new appropriations.

The fund has already proven it can tackle urgent problems agencies face every day:

The TMF modernized the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s specialty crops inspection system that ensures safe food reaches school lunches and military rations, eliminating paper-based processes and saving $1.72 million annually while inspectors now use tablets instead of clipboards to process over 60 billion pounds of produce.

The TMF enabled the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ benefits portals to provide clear confirmation when applications are submitted, reducing uncertainty and helping veterans receive benefits faster.

The TMF upgraded the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development systems supporting 100 grant, subsidy and loan programs, saving $8 million annually and enabling faster support for over 30,000 users.

These are real-world problems the TMF has solved for federal agencies and the people they serve every day.

Technology does not wait for budget cycles
Traditional annual appropriations are designed for predictable, stable programs and handle most federal IT investments effectively. However, certain technology challenges do not operate on that timeline, particularly when agencies face urgent security threats, system failures or opportunities that cannot wait for the next budget cycle.

Legacy systems fail on their own schedules, cybersecurity threats evolve daily, and public expectations for digital services are shaped by the private sector in real time. So why is the federal government still maintaining clunky systems that were built decades ago for missions that have fundamentally changed? Agencies face a double burden of keeping outdated technology running while trying to fund modern replacements through budget processes that move too slowly.

As House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman James Comer recently noted, the annual budget cycle has limitations when it comes to urgent technology needs. Modernization often requires flexible, cross-agency funding and oversight that move at the speed of risk.

That is where the TMF makes a measurable difference.

● 83 percent of TMF investments address urgent cybersecurity needs
● 81 percent modernize mission-critical systems
● 65 percent improve digital services for those who depend on them every day
● 54 percent build shared platforms that multiply the value of a single investment across multiple agencies

A governance model built for accountability
The TMF board evaluates competing proposals and selects only the strongest investments, requiring agencies to demonstrate viable technical approaches and commit to repayment that recapitalizes the fund for future projects. After selection, oversight operates in real time. The board, GSA and OMB review every scope change, milestone status, funding transfer and performance metric as they occur, not just quarterly. This allows immediate intervention when needed, whether that means deploying technical support, demanding course corrections or terminating underperforming investments.

That sustained oversight produces tangible results:

$12 billion in estimated cost savings and efficiency gains that protect taxpayer dollars and allow federal agencies to invest in better public services
378 million work hours saved, freeing federal employees to focus on serving the public rather than maintaining outdated systems
70 percent reduction in security risk, better protecting personal data for millions of Americans
69 percent fewer process steps, meaning less time navigating government websites to access benefits or services
79 percent increase in customer satisfaction as services become faster and easier to use
47 percent faster project completion, delivering improvements to the public sooner rather than years later

Why long-term certainty matters
The TMF board, chaired by Federal Chief Information Officer Greg Barbaccia, stands firmly behind the case for reauthorization beyond FY26. Short-term reauthorization keeps the lights on. Long-term certainty enables transformation.

Agencies planning multi-year modernization efforts need confidence that the TMF will remain available to fund them. Without sustained TMF authorization, leaders are forced into incremental fixes instead of comprehensive upgrades. That means pouring money into patching outdated systems rather than replacing them wholesale, like spending resources to repair a pager instead of upgrading to a smartphone. This approach costs more over time and leaves vulnerabilities exposed.

Globally, nations that can mobilize quickly around critical technologies set standards, shape markets and secure strategic advantages. When federal agencies face funding constraints that slow modernization while threats and expectations accelerate, the United States risks falling behind in the very technologies where American leadership matters most. The TMF exists to help maintain that competitive edge.

TMF is targeted intervention in the systems that keep the government running for taxpayers and the American people. It reflects a bipartisan recognition that technology modernization is foundational to secure services, protected taxpayer dollars and maintained public trust.

Whether you are a federal employee trying to serve the public more effectively, a contractor supporting government modernization or a taxpayer who depends on digital services working correctly the first time, the TMF is designed to help agencies leverage commercial solutions and shared services to operate smarter and faster. Congress has consistently supported this approach across multiple administrations because it works.

Congress’ reauthorization through September is an important step. The next step is treating modernization as an enduring national priority.

Jessie Posilkin is acting executive director of the Technology Modernization Fund.

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