US federal agencies are reportedly employing an artificial intelligence system developed under Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative to identify and eliminate regulations, with an ambitious target of halving a list of 200,000 federal rules. The “DOGE AI Deregulation Tool” is currently in use at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to The Washington Post. The tool aims to determine which regulations are deemed unnecessary or legally non-essential.
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A presentation obtained by the newspaper claims that the DOGE system has already assessed more than 1,000 regulatory sections within the housing department and has driven the entirety of recent deregulation efforts at the consumer bureau. The initiative, led by what officials describe as “the best and brightest,” seeks to modernise government operations and achieve significant cost savings — potentially in the trillions — by January next year. While preliminary, the White House has framed the effort as a bold transformation of public sector efficiency.
However, critics have voiced concerns. The programme — housed within a government tech agency renamed the U.S. DOGE Service by presidential executive order — has faced lawsuits from employee unions and advocacy organisations. These challenges allege breaches of federal transparency, rule-making standards, and budgetary laws. Elon Musk, no longer formally part of the administration since May, had initially claimed the tool could lead to a trillion-dollar reduction in spending — a milestone it has yet to meet.
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Controversy has also been fuelled by comments from DOGE co-creator and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who previously proposed using arbitrary criteria — such as segments of Social Security numbers — to lay off large swathes of federal staff. Meanwhile, the American Action Forum states that in its first six months, the Trump administration enacted regulatory cuts valued at $86 billion and saved more than 52 million hours in administrative work.
