The Trump administration is preparing to unleash an artificial intelligence-powered tool designed to eliminate up to half of all U.S. federal regulations, according to internal documents and sources cited by The Washington Post. The AI initiative, led by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is part of a sweeping plan to radically downsize Washington’s regulatory footprint by the first anniversary of Trump’s second inauguration in January 2026.
The tool, dubbed the “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool,” is designed to rapidly scan and evaluate more than 200,000 federal rules, identifying which are no longer legally required and could be repealed with minimal human input. Internal PowerPoint documents obtained by The Washington Post estimate that about 100,000 regulations could be scrapped using this method, potentially saving the government trillions of dollars in compliance costs, reducing bureaucratic overhead, and “unlocking external investment.”
The AI system has already been piloted at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), where it reviewed over 1,000 regulatory sections in just two weeks. According to agency emails reviewed by the Post, DOGE staffers were training HUD employees to use the tool to identify inconsistencies between regulations and underlying statutes. However, at least one HUD employee told the newspaper the tool had made legal interpretation errors, flagging regulations as unlawful when they were not.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has also reportedly deployed the tool, and according to internal documents, the AI wrote “100% of deregulations” at the agency. CFPB did not respond to The Post‘s requests for confirmation.
The AI initiative is the latest iteration of President Trump’s aggressive push to cut regulations, which began in his first term. An executive order issued in January 2025 mandates that agencies repeal 10 rules for every new rule introduced. However, progress on deregulation has lagged behind earlier efforts, frustrating conservatives who celebrated major rollbacks in 2017. The AI tool is seen as a way to overcome staff shortages and bureaucratic inertia that have slowed the administration’s deregulatory goals.
But the strategy faces serious legal and logistical challenges. Experts cited by The Post warned that removing federal rules—many of which were enacted to protect public health, the environment, and consumer rights—is not as simple as running an algorithm. Critics fear the use of AI to bypass the legal safeguards of the Administrative Procedure Act could lead to arbitrary, error-prone decisions that are vulnerable to legal challenges.
“There’s been some flashy sideshow efforts to avoid the legal strictures, but in general, they don’t stick,” said Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan.
According to The Washington Post, the DOGE tool was developed by a team of engineers originally recruited through a project linked to Elon Musk, who reportedly departed the initiative earlier this year. Internal skepticism grew as agencies questioned DOGE’s legal authority and technical capacity to handle complex, highly specialized regulatory regimes. Still, DOGE’s legal team—led by former White House lawyer James Burnham—vetted and endorsed the project.
The PowerPoint outlines a timeline in which federal agencies would complete their deregulation target lists by September 1 and finalize all removals by January 20, 2026, the date the administration hopes to “Relaunch America.” It estimates that the AI tool will reduce the labor time needed to repeal 100,000 regulations by 93%, slashing the current estimated 3.6 million man-hours required.
The White House confirmed that the AI project is under consideration but stopped short of endorsing its full implementation. “All options are being explored,” White House spokesman Harrison Fields told The Post, adding that no plan has been formally approved and that the administration is still in an “early and creative” phase of development.
While supporters view the AI project as a transformative leap in government efficiency, others caution it may erode vital safeguards and undermine rule-of-law principles. For now, as agencies begin to train staff and feed regulations into DOGE’s AI, the battle over the future of federal oversight may increasingly be fought not just in the courts or Congress—but in the code.
