In late December 2022, I was at a small briefing being organized by Russ Vought who, at the time, was serving as the President & Founder of Center for Renewing America. In his signature understated and reserved style he unveiled his vision for the incoming House majority: a plan to make the case for cutting spending.

His career is proof that he cares deeply about budget deficits. In fact, his plan was a roadmap to a balanced budget, but instead of making the traditional case for cutting spending, he chose to present a unique approach that was seen as heretical by DC conservatives. This “heresy” (nearly the entire room of conservative luminaries was aghast with this new approach) involved not leading with discussion on spending cuts or deficit reductions, but messaging more about the evils that government is doing with the money Americans provide. In short, his message was clear: don’t talk about the money, talk about what they’re doing with it.

In the age of Trump’s second term it may seem quaint to remember a day when Republicans simply focused on numbers, but that single innovation opened the doors to what eventually became DOGE and the Reductions in Force (RIF) of 2025. Again, keep the focus on the evils of government, not on the numbers on a ledger.

Far too little has been made of my favorite Trump accomplishment of 2025–that a Cincinnati, Ohio^[1] worth of federal bureaucrats has been downsized from the federal government. But for those of us who want to see the vision of a lean, benevolent federal government that responds to the will of its elected leaders, we’ve got a long, long way yet to go.

The federal workforce still amounts to around 2.8 million, and many of those bureaucrats are charged with overseeing crushing fraud that is enriching many at the expense of our children’s future.

While our federal bureaucracy hums along, a man who helped bring this issue to a head last year, Elon Musk, believes that AI has the power to replace all jobs and “make work optional.” But are we ready to use that power to shrink the federal workforce?

Fortunately, the Trump Administration has fast-tracked approvals for technology that makes this possible, with a slew of approved tech coming online. Through the General Services Administration’s USAi platform and FedRAMP’s accelerated 20x authorization process, the first wave of AI cloud services were approved in January 2026.

Every agency now has secure, enterprise-grade access to AI tools including OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise, Google’s Gemini for Government, and specialized intelligent document processing systems. These approved technologies excel at the exact work that dominates bureaucratic labor: extracting and summarizing data from millions of forms and records in seconds, powering conversational agents that resolve routine citizen inquiries, automatically triaging cases and scoring risk, classifying evidence, and drafting official correspondence.

Using this tech already, IRS and SSA chatbots have already slashed call-center volume by up to 40%.  

What American has ever interacted with an IRS employee and had a positive experience? A recent Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) audit found that 15% of monitored IRS calls were dropped or disconnected mid-conversation, often after long holds or while the representative was supposed to be helping, with multiple complaints of agents simply hanging up rather than resolving routine questions.

The SSA offers similar chronic service problems. One 72-year-old retired public schoolteacher from California called the Social Security Administration for five consecutive days simply to apply for benefits. On her first attempt, she waited over an hour before the call dropped completely. She persisted for days before finally requesting a callback, which arrived three-and-a-half hours later. The Washington Post documented multiple similar ordeals of seniors waiting over two hours, only to be disconnected or never reached.

Horror stories like these are not anomalies. Rather, they are the result of thousands of bureaucrats doing repetitive, document-heavy tasks that AI already handles better.

But it doesn’t have to be that way and three targeted areas show where meaningful reform is possible:

First, scaling existing IRS chatbots and document-processing tools in Taxpayer Services could eliminate 10,000 to 13,000 positions (30–40% of that division).

Second, expanding SSA’s virtual agents and claims triage across teleservice centers and field offices could cut 8,000 to 10,000 roles (30–40% of routine processing).

Third, rolling out intelligent workflow automation for HR, procurement, finance, and FOIA requests government-wide could remove another 22,000 to 27,000 administrative positions (30–40% of those support functions).

Taken together, these three areas would allow the elimination of 40,000 to 50,000 federal positions in 2026 alone.

Confronting the quiet tyranny of a federal bureaucracy that extracts unnecessary levels of taxpayer money from Americans while delivering frustration, delay, and contempt in return is a problem worth solving. As AI takes on an expanded role in the private sector, a great crime would be to leave the bureaucracy untouched.

^[1] Cincinnati, Ohio Population: 309,317 (2020)