President Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative is misapplying artificial intelligence and missing its full potential.

The first round of mass layoffs of government employees has resulted in a public backlash. In response, the president said the next phase of the DOGE initiative will be more precise: “I don’t want to see a big cut where a lot of good people are cut.”

So what would a better approach to leveraging AI in a government landscape — the scalpel instead of the chainsaw — look like? Let’s start by examining the current use of AI and why it is missing the mark.

So far, Musk’s approach is to use AI on the responses of government employees, which have trickled in as a result of his controversial email to federal workers in February asking for the major bullet points summarizing what they’re working on. AI, based on tailoring a Large Language Model, uses this data to determine whether employees are essential or not.

In theory, it’s a clever idea: Train an AI model using a reliable dataset to determine and validate which kinds of jobs are unnecessary or ripe for automation. Based on its training data, the AI might have determined, for example, that if a job follows well-defined rules with no interaction or........

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