Employment proof by mail: AI evaluating responses from U.S. government employees

After millions of US government employees were asked by email to send proof of employment under threat of being fired, an AI model is to evaluate the responses and determine which jobs are needed. This was reported by NBC News, citing several people in the know. The deadline to respond to the email, which had previously led to a lot of criticism, expired on Tuesday night. It was sent by the department under the control of US billionaire Elon Musk, and there were already questions about how the potentially hundreds of thousands of responses would be evaluated in a timely manner.

Opposition from the government too

As announced by Musk on his short messaging service X, the controversial emails were sent on the weekend. Under the subject line “What did you do last week?”, the US Office of Personnel Management requested key points in the emails. Elon Musk threatened that failure to respond would be considered a dismissal. According to court documents, this email was received by more than two million federal employees, reports the news agency dpa. However, a number of ministries, including those headed by Trump confidants, then instructed their employees not to reply to the emails.

As NBC News is now reporting, citing anonymous sources, the responses are to be evaluated with the help of AI. The algorithms will then decide “whose work is critically necessary and whose is not”. This is why the email was also supplemented with the instruction not to send back any links or attachments, the news channel writes. These could not have been processed by the AI. A request to the responsible government agency asking for clarification whether humans should be involved in evaluating the responses was not answered.

Trump supports Musk

Shortly after US President Donald Trump took office, Elon Musk assumed responsibility for a new agency that is supposed to increase government efficiency, but has caused a stir with mass redundancies in particular. The Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) has since attracted a lot of criticism, and the email is just the latest in a series of measures that will ultimately be decided by the courts. Trump himself has defended the action and called for Musk to take even more “aggressive” action. He has criticized the fact that many have failed the simple test of an email and asked if they have ever seen so much “INCOMPETENCE” and “DISRESPECT”.

Previously, NBC had reported that at least one ministry had been warned that the responses could be read by hostile actors. The Ministry of Health had therefore withdrawn the obligation to respond. Those who still want to do so should keep the key points “extremely general” and write in such a way that sensitive data remains protected: “Assume that what you write will be read by malicious foreign actors and adjust your response accordingly,” NBC quotes from the internal instruction.

(mho)