AI use by the US government is ballooning. And the lack of transparency is troubling | Nathan E Sanders and Bruce Schneider

On 14 April, the Trump administration quietly acknowledged the widespread use of AI to automate government processes. The office of management and budget (OMB) disclosed a staggering 3,611 active or planned use cases for AI across the federal government. The list has ballooned by 70% from the one published in the final year of the Biden administration, and includes many disturbing-seeming plans to hand over sensitive governmental functions to AI.

Scanning this list, many readers may find many causes for alarm. It represents a transfer of decision processes from human to machine on a massive scale over matters of individual freedom, public health and wellbeing, nuclear reactor safety and more.

Consider these examples. The Health and Human Services’ (HHS) office of administration for children and families hired the world’s “scariest AI company”, Palantir – notorious for its work on behalf of the military, the CIA and ICE – to scan all grant applications to flag those not ideologically aligned with the administration’s dictates. The Federal Bureau of Prisons is developing an AI system to assess the “potential for misconduct for newly admitted inmates”, routing people into high-security confinement before they have actually done anything wrong in their custody. These read like programs fit for a Philip K Dick or George Orwell novel.

Other use cases insert AI into life-and-death decision making. The Department of Veterans Affairs is developing an AI that will listen in on calls to the veterans crisis line, and then gather information from external databases to assess the mental state and suicide risk of the caller.

The Department of Energy is testing the use of AI to control nuclear reactors, targeting a way to autonomously respond to potential nuclear safety incidents. Here’s one that’s disturbing for its retirement, rather than its deployment: the state department has ended a program to use AI to forecast mass civilian killings, which had been intended to aid conflict prevention.

While it’s easy to raise questions about these and similar uses of AI, the reality is that any of these programs could be implemented responsibly. In some cases, like the HHS system, the AI might be enforcing alignment to a policy prescription that opponents abhor. But that concern is more about the policy itself rather than the idea that agencies should comply with executive orders.

In other cases, there may even be bipartisan agreement on the goal, like taking urgent action to help veterans at risk of self-harm. Lots of work and validation is needed to prove AI safe and effective for these use cases and convince the public it is appropriate, but the idea is plausible.

In other cases, a scary-sounding AI use may not even be new. The use of predictive methods and statistics to assign prisoner security classifications goes back decades, even if such systems are often biased and ineffective.

Using autonomous systems for model predictive control (MPC) of nuclear reactors is a well studied, and a widely applied aspect of nuclear plant management. And the recently disclosed addition of AI was initiated under the Biden administration.

But anyone reviewing the 2025 inventory could be forgiven for leaping to severe conclusions. What matters are the details of how the AI system is used, and here the inventory is severely lacking.

The disclosures carry minimal information, and lack the context necessary to understand their purpose and approach. The descriptions are typically just a sentence, and rarely more than a paragraph.

And while the process theoretically involves some form of public consultation, in reality there is generally none. It would take an eagle-eyed citizen to even come across this disclosure. Unless you read FedScoop regularly, or watch the OMB’s federal chief information officer’s GitHub account, you probably missed it.

Only one of the examples cited above (the DoJ) even proposes to involve the public. Under the administration’s policy, it’s not required for the rest because they are not classified as “high impact” use cases – a label that is applied inconsistently across agencies.

We wrote a book surveying applications of AI to democratic processes worldwide, including executive agencies as well as the courts, legislatures and politics. Our conclusion was that, while there are inappropriate applications of AI in governance that should be resisted, an urgent need to reform the economics of AI, and an imperative for renovating the democratic systems it is being unleashed on, there are also valuable and beneficial use cases for AI in government.

Machine translation is a good example. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has deployed an AI translation system to help officers when human interpreters are not available. The idea that CBP, an agency under heavy scrutiny for reported abuses of human rights, would direct people to talk to a machine instead of a person may strike many as inhumane.

It’s true that human interpreters have very real advantages when it comes to understanding nuance from physical cues and social context. But an officer with a competent AI translator available immediately is better than one who cannot communicate with the person in front of them.

The Trump administration’s AI use case inventory has 70 such translation use cases, up from 58 in the Biden administration’s 2024 disclosure.

Disclosure of AI use cases could be a means to build public confidence and trust, but only if paired with consistent, meaningful public consultation. Washington DC and California are actively engaging the public to determine where and how it’s appropriate to use AI in government processes, or for government to regulate AI use in society.

Both have held public deliberations on this topic at a wide scale, using AI platforms. These examples demonstrate the potential for capturing broad-based public input to steer AI policy.

The international gold standard was arguably set by the French in 2016, via their Digital Republic Act. The law, itself informed by an online citizen consultation, requires all algorithms used to automate government administrative decisions to be subject to public records requests, to be appealable to a human reviewer, and to have mandatory notification of the use of automation to those affected by the decisions.

Canada offers another example of what more rigorous and participatory disclosure might look like. In 2025, they launched an AI use case registry, not unlike the US inventory. However, Canada also has a federal directive mandating a transparent risk-scoring and impact assessment process for automated systems that make administrative decisions about citizens.

That longstanding directive requires a detailed explanation of risks and benefits as well as consultation with certain stakeholders from the conception of the AI use case. The Canadian system could be improved; it could require a public comment period and an obligation for agencies to respond substantively to feedback before engaging in sensitive uses of AI.

AI offers real potential to improve the efficacy, efficiency and accessibility of government. But, equally, there is legitimate reason for public concern and distrust that can only be addressed through transparency and dialog. The US should adopt, at the federal and state level, algorithmic impact risk assessment procedures and public comment processes to facilitate a safe, trusted, equitable transformation of government agencies to take advantage of modern technology.

• Nathan E Sanders is a data scientist affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center of Harvard University and co-author, with Bruce Schneier, of the book Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship. Bruce Schneier is a security technologist who teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University and University of Toronto’s Munk School