Tech brain drain in government is putting the U.S. at risk

At the hands of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the U.S. government is experiencing an alarming technology brain drain. This risks leaving the country unprepared for any coming crisis, particularly the threat posed by artificial intelligence.

When President Barack Obama created the United States Digital Service in 2014, the challenge was this: How do you persuade the brightest talent to forgo Silicon Valley riches and instead work on difficult, unsexy products for a relative pittance?

The answer was to appeal to workers’ desire to do what’s best for their country and tell them the rewards would last a lifetime. The initiative thus attracted top talent that would have otherwise been at Google, Amazon and elsewhere.

The USDS — a startup by an elite team within government, in essence — has built technologies that improved the lives of millions of Americans. It revamped websites that looked as if they had been designed in the 1990s — because they had. It built the free direct filing system for taxes, a service that recorded a 90% satisfaction rate from users. It drastically improved VA.gov, the service used by more than 1.5 million veterans every month to access the full range of benefits available to them.

When COVID-19 struck, it was the USDS that rapidly pulled together the intricate system that quickly matched Americans with available vaccine appointments. More than 100 million people used it.

Under President Donald Trump and Musk, the USDS is now falling apart.

Trump renamed USDS the United States DOGE Service, a sleight of hand that allowed the administration to launch Musk’s cost-cutting crusade without congressional approval. This has given DOGE the ability to maraud through government departments, firing employees and creating chaos.

Under scrutiny, DOGE’s evidence of its savings has simply evaporated. The costs, however, are clearly great: Earlier this month, according to The Associated Press, about 40 USDS workers were fired. On Tuesday, an additional 21 employees resigned, explaining in a joint letter that their work had been unethically diverted and that they had been subjected to interrogations questioning their political loyalties.

“We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” the letter read. “We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.”

The hollowing out of the USDS will set back the progress made on bringing online government services up to speed. Then comes the matter of the yet-to-be-fully understood impact of AI — another area where proposed cuts could leave the U.S. at a disadvantage just as the technology approaches an inflection point.

According to Axios, the recently formed AI Safety Institute (AISI) is on the chopping block along with almost 500 jobs at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). AISI was created thanks to an executive order by President Joe Biden to work with and monitor the AI being built and deployed by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. It had set up a government task force to assess risk, “laying the foundation for AI safety across the world.”

Given the dearth of congressional action on AI, it could be seen as one of the few steps taken by the U.S. to keep tabs on Silicon Valley’s worst excesses. That, of course, includes Musk’s own company, xAI. This is yet another government watchdog being dismantled by the multibillionaire.

If AISI were to be gutted, as reports suggest, it could also harm international relations regarding the safety issues surrounding AI. AISI had been working with several other countries to coordinate research projects that may now be left up in the air. US-based AI companies may be less inclined to cooperate with researchers working for foreign governments. One person working closely with the UK government on AI safety said the U.S. cuts reflected the broad confusion around the White House’s AI policies. “The tech right isn’t aligned,” the person said.

The long-term damage of all this is hard to calculate but difficult to overstate.

A dismantled AISI will make it harder to monitor and curtail the self-serving actions of the hypercompetitive AI market. A weakened USDS leaves the U.S. less able to provide citizens with the services they deserve.

To handle what’s next, the U.S. needs the best and brightest tech talent on its payroll. Firing smart minds within these critical government services, or giving principled federal workers no choice but to resign, can and will backfire.

—With assistance from Parmy Olson.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Dave Lee is Bloomberg Opinion’s U.S. technology columnist. He was previously a correspondent for the Financial Times and BBC News.