The Machines the Cuts Were Sold On Never Arrived

In late September the administration ordered every federal department and agency to stop writing "artificial intelligence" and write "super intelligence" instead, in reports, websites, and correspondence ^[1]. Trump's reasoning at the United Nations was that the word "artificial" made intelligence sound fake, and it isn't. A renaming was the one piece of the AI agenda that arrived on schedule — complete, and on its own terms. The contraction the new label names was already more than a year old. The cuts began before anyone was told what to call the thing. In 2025 the General Services Administration directed agencies to "eliminate, optimize, automate" their workflows, and the administration has since shed more than 270,000 federal jobs through hiring freezes, early retirements, and reductions in force ^[2]. During the October 2025 shutdown it skipped the customary temporary furloughs and issued reduction-in-force notices to more than 4,000 employees across seven agencies ^[3]. Trump was explicit about what a shutdown was for.

We can do things during the shutdown that are irreversible, like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like. — Donald Trump

Sixteen months in, the swap that was supposed to replace people with machines is half-built. The part that actually got built isn't the machines; it's the loyalty machinery. In June 2026 the administration reclassified roughly 8,000 of its most senior career employees as at-will — dismissible without the usual civil-service process — a change unions are fighting in court ^[4]. Scott Kupor, who runs the Office of Personnel Management, was explicit about the point of that change.

You can have any political views, but if you allow those views to basically interfere with your willingness to actually carry out lawful orders and policy directives with the administration, then this provides a mechanism obviously for people in those agencies to be able to be removed effectively at will — Scott Kupor

The same design runs through the rest of the rebuild. Rehiring is centralized, with diversity rules rolled back so that new hires align with presidential priorities, and Kupor shrugs off the charge that this is political by saying the process was designed that way ^[5]. In February 2026 Treasury terminated the union contracts at the IRS and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service ^[6]. A proposed government-wide nondisclosure agreement would add the threat of removal for anyone who declines to sign ^[7]. What stands in for the AI is vendors and pilots, not machines anyone has shown can do the work. Salesforce's Agentforce is being tried by dozens of federal agencies for benefits and claims adjudication ^[8]. The rehire pipeline runs partly through Tech Force, a partnership with OpenAI and Meta that places engineers in government ^[5]. OPM even moved its own human-resources operation onto Oracle's cloud, at an undisclosed price ^[9]. The revolving door turns both ways: the same AI firms are hiring the administration's former technology officials ^[10]. The work itself is still uncovered, and the gaps have human dimensions. The IRS onboarded 50 of the 2,200 hires it needed for the 2026 tax season ^[5]. Its chief executive, Frank Bisignano, is comfortable with that.

I feel good about the number of employees I have right now. — Frank Bisignano

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency lost 40 percent of its staff ^[5]. The IRS service center in Ogden, Utah, let go just under 1,500 people during the shutdown ^[11], and a union coordinator there, Dan Martinez, described them as people who had sworn an oath to serve the American public. The overhaul is tied to roughly 100,000 lost jobs across the Washington region ^[12]. It is the federal chief information officer, Gregory Barbaccia, who has named the machines as the answer to that gap.

AI is the number one thing that is going to help people mitigate the staffing shortages — Gregory Barbaccia

The machines he points to are still pilots, not replacements ^[8]. Kupor has already conceded the overcorrection, allowing that some skills probably have to be hired back ^[5]. His fuller accounting — that the government sometimes over-restructures and sometimes under-restructures — is the closest thing the administration has offered to an honest reckoning of the swap ^[5]. The next real test is the 2027 filing season the IRS is now preparing for, with most of the 2,200 hires the last one lacked still unmade ^[5].