Over the past year, the Trump administration has emphasized the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption to both “deliver the highly responsive government the American people expect and deserve” and help the Department of Defense “maintain its global military preeminence.” This effort builds on initiatives from the Biden administration and the first Trump administration, which encouraged agencies to experiment with AI in their workflows, endeavored to build a more AI-savvy workforce, and sought to break down bottlenecks to AI adoption.
The current administration has operationalized these efforts through various vehicles. These include a new talent recruitment process known as the U.S. Tech Force, through the General Services Administration’s (GSA) OneGov pooled-procurement strategy, and as part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was established by executive order in January 2025, though its current status remains unclear. The initiative, led by Elon Musk for its first four months, promised to modernize federal technology, maximize productivity, and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse across the executive branch. One year later, it is increasingly evident that this effort—and its frenetic activity during the first half of 2025—may have instead made it more difficult for agencies to adopt AI, despite a top-down mandate.
Lambert: That’s a damn shame.
According to federal job listing data analyzed in my forthcoming report, the number of technical jobs specifying AI capabilities rose from none in 2016 to around 9% of all technical jobs in 2024 (318 roles). Approximately 25% of the AI-specific job listings were posted from 2024 onward, after Biden’s executive order. This means that by February 2025—when reductions in force began across the federal government—many of these recent hires were still probationary employees, making them much easier to dismiss as part of the mass firings and resignations that shrunk the federal workforce by approximately 250,000 employees.
Lambert here: “Learn to vibe code,” yo.
The “deletion” of 18F, a small digital services agency within the GSA, and the tumult at the U.S. Digital Service—the White House technology team repurposed to house DOGE—further stymied tech modernization efforts and halted projects that could have genuinely improved how the federal government serves citizens, including a long-awaited direct file project for taxes.
For an administration that made federal AI adoption central to its agenda, the haphazard culling of the federal workforce inadvertently removed the people working to achieve this objective.
DOGE’s explicit framing of AI adoption around efficiency and workforce reduction did little to catalyze cultural change and made an already challenging environment more difficult. Federal employees who might otherwise embrace AI tools instead perceived it as an existential threat to their livelihoods. And warranted concerns about surveillance and job displacement among staff who occupy critical chokepoints may have led them to drag their feet, quietly block pilots, or resist scaling beneficial systems. With fixed-term technology talent primed to swoop in for a few years, it is easy enough to wait them out rather than experiment.
Adding to these concerns, high-profile incidents of DOGE accessing systems without proper security credentials and releasing sensitive but unclassified information about intelligence agencies on the public-facing DOGE website, among other incidents, may have confirmed fears about improper data stewardship, amplified distrust, and fostered more risk aversion toward future data linkages.
DOGE’s activities over the past year demonstrate what happens when federal government modernization meets a “move fast and break things” mentality. Rather than achieving its mission—which even Musk acknowledged was only “somewhat successful”—the rapid flurry of activity catalyzed by DOGE may have done more to undermine technology adoption than facilitate it.
Lambert here: And this is bad why? Given that AI is the technology on offer?
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