cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/7465072

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/22888

The Trump administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to write federal transportation regulations, according to U.S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers. The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI’s “potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings,” agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues. The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase “exciting new AI tools available to DOT rule writers to help us do our job better and faster.”

Discussion of the plan continued among agency leadership last week, according to meeting notes reviewed by ProPublica. Gregory Zerzan, the agency’s general counsel, said at that meeting that President Donald Trump is “very excited about this initiative.” Zerzan seemed to suggest that the DOT was at the vanguard of a broader federal effort, calling the department the “point of the spear” and “the first agency that is fully enabled to use AI to draft rules.”

Zerzan appeared interested mainly in the quantity of regulations that AI could produce, not their quality. “We don’t need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don’t even need a very good rule on XYZ,” he said, according to the meeting notes. “We want good enough.” Zerzan added, “We’re flooding the zone.”

These developments have alarmed some at DOT. The agency’s rules touch virtually every facet of transportation safety, including regulations that keep airplanes in the sky, prevent gas pipelines from exploding and stop freight trains carrying toxic chemicals from skidding off the rails. Why, some staffers wondered, would the federal government outsource the writing of such critical standards to a nascent technology notorious for making mistakes?

The DOT plan, which has not previously been reported, represents a new front in the Trump administration’s campaign to incorporate artificial intelligence into the work of the federal government. This administration is not the first to use AI; federal agencies have been gradually stitching the technology into their work for years, including to translate documents, analyze data and categorize public comments, among other uses. But the current administration has been particularly enthusiastic about the technology. Trump released multiple executive orders in support of AI last year. In April, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought circulated a memo calling for the acceleration of its use by the federal government. Three months later, the administration released an “AI Action Plan” that contained a similar directive. None of those documents, however, called explicitly for using AI to write regulations, as DOT is now planning to do.

Those plans are already in motion. The department has used AI to draft a still-unpublished Federal Aviation Administration rule, according to a DOT staffer briefed on the matter.

Skeptics say that so-called large language models such as Gemini and ChatGPT shouldn’t be trusted with the complicated and consequential responsibilities of governance, given that those models are prone to error and incapable of human reasoning. But proponents see AI as a way to automate mindless tasks and wring efficiencies out of a slow-moving federal bureaucracy.

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