November 14, 2024
Today, Donald Trump appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
I’ll tell you why I’m optimistic.
What’s Changed?
Making the U.S. government more efficient is not a new presidential task.
Five of the last six presidents have issued executive orders or launched programs to audit and improve the government’s efficiency.
What’s new, however, is AI—and leaders who know how to use it.
Government Inefficiencies
Looking at the 2023 federal budget in broad strokes, the places to look for government inefficiencies are bureaucratic systems, healthcare, and defense.
What’s new now is that we can solve many of these government inefficiencies with AI.
Healthcare Transformation
A look at the numbers:
- Current spending: $1.455T (Medicare/Medicaid)
- Total healthcare spending: $4.5T
AI Solution Categories:
- Primary Care Automation
- Health Coaching
- Back Office Operations
- Drug Discovery
- Preventive Care
Defense Spending Reform
Defense spending operates on a cost-plus model.
If you exceed your budget, you simply increase it and bill the Pentagon more.
This works because the Pentagon can’t easily switch contractors.
Moving away from the cost-plus model is challenging, but AI could help.
We can use AI for better forecasting on project budgets and defense proposals, and AI CAD to design new defense applications.
Bureaucratic Systems Improvement
Bureaucratic systems can be anything from limiting the amount of people hired to reducing paperwork burden, and even making the visit to social security more bearable.
Any government process should have an RPA plus LLM automating that process.
Conclusion
Here’s what’s needed.
Political Willingness
While the congress, senate, and white house are now run by one party, there needs to be a willingness to change the status quo.
A great way to change the status quo is radical transparency.
Elon has turned the audit of inefficiency into a spectator sport through X, catalyzing change.
Human Capital
Once the key challenges are identified, the next step to hire or contract top talent to automate paperwork, reform healthcare, and overhaul defense.
Infrastructure
To automate everything, we are going to need more compute and AI infrastructure companies.