DOGE Builds AI Tool to Cut 50 Percent of Federal Regulations

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DOGE builds AI tool to cut 50 percent of federal regulations
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"The DOGE experts creating these plans are the best and brightest in the business."
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The tool, called the “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool,” is supposed to analyze roughly 200,000 federal regulations to determine which can be eliminated because they are no longer required by law, according to a PowerPoint presentation obtained by The Post that is dated July 1 and outlines DOGE’s plans. Roughly 100,000 of those rules would be deemed worthy of trimming, the PowerPoint estimates — mostly through the automated tool with some staff feedback.

The tool has already been used to complete “decisions on 1,083 regulatory sections” at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in under two weeks, according to the PowerPoint, and to write “100% of deregulations” at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Three HUD employees — as well as documents obtained by The Post — confirmed that an AI tool was recently used to review hundreds, if not more than 1,000, lines of regulations at that agency and suggest edits or deletions.

The tool was developed by engineers brought into government as part of Elon Musk’s DOGE project…

[White House spokesman Harrison Fields added: “The DOGE experts creating these plans are the best and brightest in the business and are embarking on a never-before-attempted transformation of government systems and operations to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.”

“Creative deployment of artificial intelligence to advance the president’s regulatory agenda is one logical strategy to make significant progress in that finite amount of time,” wrote James Burnham, who served as chief attorney for DOGE and is now managing partner at King Street Legal.

[I]t’s unclear whether a new, untested technology could make mistakes in its attempts to analyze federal regulations typically put in place for a reason.

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Lambert here: It’s crystal clear. Have these reporters lost their minds?

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Trump has pushed the limits of the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs repealing federal regulations, most notably through an executive order ending a rule that restricted the water flow of showerheads. It is unclear if courts will allow the administration to void rules. Meanwhile, private-sector companies tend to be uncomfortable ignoring a rule that was illegally repealed, said Nicholas Bagley, an administrative law expert at the University of Michigan.

“There’s been some flashy sideshow efforts to avoid the legal strictures, but in general, they don’t stick,” Bagley said of Trump’s unilateral efforts to cut regulations.

DOGE officials may be concerned about the legality of the AI tool. One page of the slideshow says four people identified as “DOGE lawyers” — Burnham, Austin Raynor, Jacob Altik and Ashley Boizelle — each “vetted and endorsed” the AI deregulation tool. Raynor, Altik and Boizelle could not be reached for comment.

One HUD employee who participated in this process said the AI tool made several errors. It delivered an analysis saying those who drafted various agency regulations had misunderstood the law in several places, said the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal conversations. But the AI tool was sometimes wrong, the employee said.

“There were a couple places where the AI said the language was outside of the statute,” the employee said, “and actually, no — the AI read the language wrong, and it is actually correct.”

After its tryout at HUD, the AI deregulation tool is supposed to deploy across the rest of government in coming months, according to the DOGE PowerPoint.

Over the next five months, agencies will work with the AI tool to identify regulations to kill, respond to public comments about the proposed deletions and submit formal deregulation proposals, the PowerPoint says. The goal is to wrap everything up and “Relaunch America on Jan. 20, 2026,” the PowerPoint states.

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Lambert here: PowerPoint, eh? And Janunary 20, 2026 has come and gone.

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Legislation (Federal)
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Databases and Systems (Government)
Databases and Systems (Private)

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