JOB-CUTTING SCYTHE
Trump established DOGE to modernise government software, cut spending and drastically reduce the size of the federal workforce, which he complains is bloated and wasteful.
DOGE has said it has saved more than US$160 billion through cuts to federal contracts and staff, but it has given few details publicly about what it is doing to modernise technology to make the government more efficient.
The update of the Pentagon software, which DOGE has not publicly confirmed, is the only known example of that effort bearing fruit.
Currently, most federal RIFs are done manually – with HR employees poring over spreadsheets containing data on employee seniority, veteran status and performance, three sources told Reuters.
The new software is being rolled out just as larger agencies such as the Department of Veterans Affairs are set to move forward with plans to eliminate some 80,000 jobs. The Internal Revenue Service has said it wants to slash its payrolls by 40 per cent, according to media reports.
The tool will allow agencies “to remove a massive number of federal employees from their positions,” if it works, said Nick Bednar, an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota who has been tracking the government layoffs.
“What DOGE has started is going to continue without Elon Musk,” Bednar said.
AutoRIF was developed by the Pentagon more than a quarter century ago. It pulled data from its HR system, sifted through firing rules quickly and produced names of employees eligible to be laid off.
But it was difficult to migrate it to other agencies, whose workers had to manually input data on potential candidates for dismissal, a cumbersome process that is subject to errors. The program, described as “clunky” by a 2020 Pentagon HR newsletter, also would allow only one employee to work on a RIF, two sources said.
The upgrade makes it web-based, easing employee access to the tool while enabling multiple people to work on a mass layoff, three sources said. It also allows for the upload of employee data for analysis, freeing HR workers from having to manually input personal records of possible targets for dismissal.
While speed is a clear advantage, the software could pose other challenges, according to Don Moynihan, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy.
“If you automate bad assumptions into a process, then the scale of the error becomes far greater than an individual could undertake,” Moynihan said.
“It won’t necessarily help them to make better decisions and it won’t make those decisions more popular,” Moynihan added.
Trump’s drive to downsize and reshape the government already has led to the gutting of entire agencies such as the US Agency for International Development as well as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which seeks to protect Americans from financial abuses.
The government overhaul has led to numerous lawsuits that seek to block the Trump administration from moving forward with some of the planned dismissals.
