The Trump administration disclosed 3,611 active or planned AI use cases across the federal government on April 14, a 70% increase from the inventory published in the final year of the Biden administration, according to the Office of Management and Budget. The list includes plans to automate sensitive governmental functions involving individual freedom, public health, and nuclear reactor safety.
The disclosure represents a significant expansion of automated decision-making in government, but critics say the inventory lacks the detail needed for meaningful public oversight. The descriptions are typically just a sentence and rarely more than a paragraph, according to Nathan E. Sanders, a data scientist affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, and Bruce Schneier, a security technologist who teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School. The two co-authored the book “Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship.”
Among the use cases disclosed, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Administration for Children and Families contracted Palantir — a company Sanders and Schneier described as the world’s “scariest AI company,” known for work with 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 committed any infraction in custody, according to the inventory.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is building an AI that listens in on calls to the veterans crisis line and gathers 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. Sanders and Schneier noted that using autonomous systems for model predictive control of nuclear reactors is a well-studied and widely applied aspect of nuclear plant management, and that the recently disclosed addition of AI was initiated under the Biden administration.
The State Department has ended a program that used AI to forecast mass civilian killings, which had been intended to aid conflict prevention, according to the disclosure.
Customs and Border Protection has deployed an AI translation system to help officers when human interpreters are not available. The inventory lists 70 such translation use cases, up from 58 in the Biden administration’s 2024 disclosure.
Sanders and Schneier wrote that while any of these programs could be implemented responsibly, the inventory carries minimal information and lacks the context necessary to understand their purpose and approach. They noted that the process theoretically involves some form of public consultation, but in reality there is generally none.
“Only one of the examples cited above (the DoJ) even proposes to involve the public,” they wrote. Under the administration’s policy, public consultation is not required for the rest because they are not classified as “high impact” use cases — a label that is applied inconsistently across agencies, according to the authors.
The authors pointed to international models for more rigorous disclosure. France’s 2016 Digital Republic Act 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. Canada launched an AI use case registry in 2025 and has a federal directive mandating a transparent risk-scoring and impact assessment process for automated systems that make administrative decisions about citizens.
“AI offers real potential to improve the efficacy, efficiency and accessibility of government,” Sanders and Schneier wrote. “But, equally, there is legitimate reason for public concern and distrust that can only be addressed through transparency and dialog.”