Following DOGE, US States Pursue 'Efficiency' Initiatives
After the frenzy of the first months of the second Trump administration and following billionaire far-right political activist Elon Musk’s departure from government, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has fallen out of the headlines.
But across the United States, dozens of state governments have attempted to establish their own efficiency initiatives, some molded in the image of DOGE. A common theme across many of these initiatives is the “stated goal of identifying and eliminating inefficiencies in state government using artificial intelligence (AI)” and promoting “expanded access to existing state data systems,” according to a recent analysis by Maddy Dwyer, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
To learn more about what these efforts look like and to consider the broader question of AI’s use in government, I spoke to Dwyer and Ben Green, an assistant professor in the University of Michigan School of Information and in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, who has written about DOGE and the use of AI in government for Tech Policy Press.
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