The Trump administration’s cut of more than 270,000 federal workers alongside aggressive AI automation and the America.gov gateway is not smaller government but a shift to machines that execute decisions without human hesitation, objection or whistleblowing.

AI can reduce paperwork, yet replacing humans in surveillance, investigations, eligibility and targeting risks running law at machine speed, bypassing due process and creating accountability gaps when private algorithms make or recommend consequential choices.

Once such systems are embedded—whether for paperwork or military targeting—they become hard to restrain for future administrations, so fewer employees can still mean greater, less limited power over citizens’ lives.

The era of small government is over.

Anyone who tells you differently is selling you a lie.

Case in point: Donald Trump promised to shrink the federal government.

But what if Trump’s pledge to cut the federal work force wasn’t really about eliminating government bureaucracy but outsourcing it to the AI tech sector?

What if Trump, with the backing of a self-serving industry eager to automate government, is instead helping to build a government that no longer needs as many human beings to operate it?

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are disappearing from the government payroll at the same time that Washington is racing to automate the work they once performed with artificial intelligence.

Since Trump returned to office, the federal workforce has shrunk by more than 270,000 employees, the result of hiring freezes, deferred resignations, early retirements and reductions in force.

At the same time, the Trump administration has embraced an aggressive campaign to automate government operations, with the General Services Administration instructing agencies to “eliminate, optimize and automate“ their work wherever possible.

This is not a return to smaller government.

It is a dangerous recalibration of government power.

What we are watching unfold is the construction of a government that requires fewer human beings to carry out its will, fewer human beings to question its orders, and fewer human beings to stand in the way when efficiency collides with legality, morality or constitutional restraint.

That is the real danger of automating government.

Human beings hesitate. Human beings question. Human beings object. Human beings refuse. Human beings blow the whistle.

Machines do not hesitate. They do not object. They do not blow the whistle.

For the most part, machines do what they are programmed to do. Until they don’t.

For an administration increasingly impatient with legal restraints, institutional resistance and anyone who says “no,” that is not merely a technological convenience.

It is an authoritarian temptation.

Anyone who believes smaller government means less government power needs to think again, because a government run by machines is still government.

Likewise, a government without bureaucrats is not necessarily a government without bureaucracy.

It may simply be bureaucracy without human beings.

And bureaucracy without human beings may prove far more powerful, pervasive and difficult to restrain than anything that came before it.

What is taking shape is a government that may employ fewer human beings while possessing exponentially greater power to surveil, process, classify, investigate and control the population.

Indeed, the administration has now launched America.gov, an AI-powered centralized digital gateway through which Americans will eventually interact with federal agencies and complete government transactions. The White House boasts that it will allow the federal government to “do its own paperwork.”

AI can certainly reduce backlogs, simplify forms, process information and free workers from tedious tasks.

Certainly, artificial intelligence can help eliminate repetitive paperwork, reduce backlogs, identify waste, simplify complicated forms, translate government jargon into plain English, process enormous amounts of information and free human workers from tedious tasks.

The concern is not whether AI can be useful.

The danger begins when AI stops assisting human beings and starts replacing them—not merely as clerks but as decision-makers, investigators, gatekeepers, analysts and enforcers of government power.

Thus, the........

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