DOGE Fires Workers And Replaces Them With A Chatbot

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE as everyone calls it, has been shaking things up big time. They’ve already slashed tons of jobs across agencies, and now they’re rolling out a chatbot to pick up the slack. It’s called GSAi, and about 1,500 workers at the General Services Administration are already using it.

So, what’s the deal with this thing? The General Services Administration, which handles stuff like government buildings and contracts, lost hundreds of employees recently. Some say over 1,000 are gone, including a chunk of their tech team.

DOGE stepped in and handed out this GSAi chatbot to help with basic tasks. Workers can use it to write emails, whip up talking points, or even crank out some code. It’s built with three models to pick from — Claude Haiku 3.5 is the main one, but there’s also Claude Sonnet 3.5 v2 and Meta Llama 3.2.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The chatbot isn’t just a random tool they grabbed off the shelf. It’s custom-made for government use, or so they claim. WIRED got a peek at some internal memos, and they say employees were told not to feed it anything sensitive. No private government data, no personal info — nothing like that. One worker compared it to having an intern. It’s handy, but the answers are pretty basic and predictable.

The timing’s got people talking. DOGE’s been pushing hard to cut jobs, with some calling it the biggest workforce purge America’s ever seen. And now, right after firing tech folks and others, they drop this chatbot? An AI expert wondered if the plan is to slap AI on everything and then use that as an excuse to fire even more people. It’s a theory that’s tough to ignore.

This didn’t come out of nowhere, though. GSAi was in the works before Musk’s crew took over. The agency had been messing around with chatbot ideas for a while, even teaming up with places like the Treasury and the Department of Education. Those projects never really took off — one engineer called them ‘janky’ — but DOGE sped things up and pushed GSAi out the door fast. They started testing it with 150 users back in February, and now it’s live for way more.

Not everyone’s thrilled. The GSA’s tech branch is shrinking fast — they just cut about 90 people, and a guy named Thomas Shedd, who used to work at Tesla, says it’s dropping by half soon. He’s all in on AI, though, and wants it to be a big part of what’s left. Meanwhile, some of the folks who got axed might’ve been the ones building this chatbot in the first place. Kind of ironic, right?

Other agencies are watching this closely. The Army’s already using some AI tool called CamoGPT to tweak training stuff, and Health and Human Services was thinking about chatbots too. For now, GSAi’s the star of the show, but it’s got limits. Workers can’t use it for anything confidential, which cuts down on what it can really do. Still, DOGE’s betting big on it — maybe too big, if you ask the critics.