Welcome to The Daily Brief. Today, we’re looking at a major tech overhaul in Washington. Under Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE for short—the federal Office of Personnel Management is rolling out a revamped version of an old Pentagon program called AutoRIF, short for “Reduction in Force.” Now renamed the “Workforce Reshaping Tool,” this web-based software can process layoff targets in minutes rather than weeks. Since January, some 260,000 federal employees have already left through buyouts, early retirements, or layoffs—but the process has been slow and error-prone. Now agencies like Veterans Affairs and the IRS, which plan to cut tens of thousands of jobs, will be able to “remove a massive number of federal employees from their positions,” as law professor Nick Bednar warns. But experts like Don Moynihan caution that “if you automate bad assumptions, the scale of the error becomes far greater.” That’s The Daily Brief—thanks for listening.
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