Washington Post – no paywall – Identify “mission-critical” jobs? Spot dead people on Social Security rolls? Government needs AI -— but what DOGE appears to be doing doesn’t add up. The U.S. DOGE Service is pursuing an “AI-first” strategy to remake the government. I understand why it’s an alluring idea: Bring a noted technologist like Elon Musk to Washington. Unleash artificial intelligence. Let the data determine what’s wasteful. “He’s created these algorithms that are constantly crawling through the data. And, as he told me in his office, the data doesn’t lie,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) said last month. But I hear a different story when I talk to technologists who’ve long advocated for government automation. There’s little reason to believe that AI — impressive as its advances may be — can accomplish even a fraction of what DOGE might want us to believe right now. Data most definitely can lie…”

If we could just take a tool and eliminate fraud in the federal government, I would be 1,000 percent behind it,” said Lynn Overmann, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Beeck Center, a think tank for practitioners in government automation. “Technology can be a really powerful tool to tackle some of the problems that they claim to be tackling. They’re just not using it that way.”