A nonprofit group that has filed multiple legal challenges against the Trump administration submitted public record requests to several federal agencies this week on their use of artificial intelligence (AI) to make personnel decisions.
In Freedom of Information Act filings and other actions, Democracy Forward on Monday said it has “launched a public records investigation” into the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), USAID, Office of Personnel Management, General Services Administration, State Department, Defense Department and Treasury Department.
“DOGE and this administration are operating in a shroud of secrecy, and their ‘govern by chaos’ tactics have only made government less efficient and caused disruptions to our safety and security,” Democracy Forward CEO Skye Perryman said in a statement.
“The American people deserve to know what is going on — including if and how artificial intelligence is being used to reshape the departments and agencies people rely on daily,” Perryman added in a written statement. “We will continue to use every tool at our disposal to force the Trump-Vance administration to fulfill its obligation to the public and to our system of laws.”
The organization’s request comes days after NBC News reported that Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who oversees DOGE, planned to use AI to review government employees’ response to a email request from the Office of Personnel Management to list five job accomplishments for the week. DOGE intended to feed the workers’ email replies into a large language model (LLM) to determine which jobs were “mission critical,” according to NBC.
The DOGE initiative has “found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud,” Trump claimed during his annual address to Congress on Tuesday night. Trump said the savings have gone to debt reduction.
Democracy Forward has brought more than 25 legal actions against the Trump administration. The organization has scored legal victories that include a federal court injunction on the administration’s federal funding freeze and a ruling from the Merit Systems Protection Board that stayed the termination of six federal workers.
DOGE, an advisory board led by Musk, has fired thousands of federal workers in a vigorous push to slash government waste and streamline the federal government. Last month, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said Musk had “created these algorithms that are constantly crawling through the data. And, as he told me in his office, the data doesn’t lie.”
Nearly two dozen civil service employees, many of whom previously held senior roles at Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, resigned from DOGE last week after they refused to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”
