- Federal employees are about to get a new level of workplace scrutiny. The Elon Musk-led cost-cutting team in the Trump administration is using AI to scan employees’ communications for anti-Trump feelings, Reuters reported. One former federal staffer said while they were used to scrutiny in their job, “now, the stakes are higher.”
It’s no secret that the Trump administration is fixing particularly hard scrutiny on the federal workforce. But now, they’ve reportedly added artificial intelligence to the mix.
The Elon Musk-led team known as the Department of Government Efficiency has rolled out AI to monitor workers’ communications for perceived anti-Trump sentiment, Reuters reported, citing two unnamed people. The technology is already being used at the Environmental Protection Agency, the report said.
The move marks “an extraordinary use of technology to identify expressions of perceived disloyalty in a workforce already upended by widespread firings,” Reuters said.
DOGE did not respond to a request for comment from Fortune.
The approach is consistent with the Trump administration’s desire for intense loyalty from employees and applicants, according to widespread media reports and a former federal employee.
Tesla CEO Musk, a special presidential advisor, has likewise been open about his plans to turn over large parts of the government to artificial intelligence. Musk has reportedly introduced an AI chatbot into one agency while his allies have laid out a cost-cutting strategy that would rely on AI, according to The New York Times and 404 Media.
“We’re in an unprecedented time with regard to how the government is operating at the moment and what the federal sector looks like,” Sarah Block, a partner at employment law firm McGillivary Steele Elkin, told Fortune.
“The government may have always been able to look at your email, if you’re a government employee,” she said. “But I think agencies were not doing that—they could, but they weren’t.”
The Trump administration and Musk have fired workers en masse, attempted to cancel union contracts with federal employees, and clawed back funding already appropriated by Congress under previous administrations.
Because federal workers are subject to public-records laws, most likely already expect their email to be monitored, said one longtime federal employee who moved to the private sector last year.
But now, “the stakes are higher. And the willingness to skirt laws is brazen,” the person said.
Firing or reassigning workers based on their feelings about President Trump would be against the law, which protects civil servants from being penalized for political reasons.
“It’s a prohibited personnel practice to discriminate against someone for partisan political reasons,” said Block. “It’s essentially political discrimination.”