A leaked recording on Tuesday revealed the Trump administration’s plans to use AI to help rewrite a large chunk of the federal government’s computer systems.
One of Elon Musk’s associates—who now holds a high-level government post in the Trump administration—also urged federal employees to “push forward” despite being told that his orders amounted to an “illegal task,” according to audio of a meeting obtained by technology publication 404 Media.
Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who is now responsible for heading a team of government coders at the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), explained to employees at a recent meeting how the Trump administration plans to deploy AI throughout the government.
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The TTS, according to its website, has been “working to improve access to government services“ for the past 50 years. It helps “agencies make their services more accessible, efficient, and effective with modern applications, platforms, processes, personnel, and software solutions.”
Shedd also floated a plan to aggregate employees’ personal data in a more centralized and accessible manner—something one employee later clarified was illegal to do without those employees’ consent.
“Just like a fun one that we’ve been thinking through with Login, specifically in TTS is, as most of you know, Login can’t access government information on individuals. And so there’s no connection that Login has with social security or any other government system, even though we’re part of the government,” Shedd said. “And so part of one of the things to work through is how do we make it so that those agencies that has that information of very secure APIs that can be leveraged by login to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud?”
The employee flagged the Privacy Act, which keeps agencies from sharing workers’ personal information without their consent, during a later question-and-answer session.
“I think we were on the topic of login aggregating data. It’s an illegal task,” the employee asked in a written submission. “The Privacy Act forbids agencies sharing personal information without consent.”
Shedd responded by brushing the concerns aside, stating that the government will “try to get consent”—but that shouldn’t stop them from moving ahead with the project.
“If we hit a roadblock, then we hit a roadblock,” he said. “But we still should push forward and see what we can do.”
“Things are going to get intense,” he added.
Neither Shedd nor the GSA responded to a request for comment from The New York Times, which also reported details of the meeting.
During the recorded meeting, Shedd sounded much more like a company executive looking to cut costs in a bid to please shareholders than a federal employee building systems for public benefit, according to 404 Media. He laid out an expansive vision for a tech-driven transformation of the federal government, using his small team at TTS as the tip of the proverbial spear.
Among the plans shared were a series of “AI coding agents,” trained on current government code, that could write software to streamline government processes. The applications envisioned for such AI agents included a centralized database of government contracts that could then be “analyzed.”
“This does raise red flags,” a cybersecurity expert told WIRED on Monday, noting that automating the government isn’t the same as automating, say, a self-driving car. “People, especially people who aren’t experts in the subject domain, coming into projects often think ‘this is dumb’ and then find out how hard the thing really is.”
At least one employee told 404 Media that the reaction among TTS employees to Shedd’s ideas was “pretty unanimously negative.”
The task to revamp the federal government’s computer systems, however, is well underway, according to new reporting Tuesday from Talking Points Memo.
According to the publication, Musk operatives have already pushed extensive code changes to the Treasury Department payment system, which is responsible for making 95% of the federal government’s payments.
One of Musk’s staffers at his so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” 25-year-old Marko Elez, has secured administrative privileges on the crucial system.
“The changes that have been made all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked,” TPM reported, while noting that it does not appear that any payments have so far been blocked.
