The Trump administration is making it’s biggest move to slash unnecessary and expensive federal regulations through the Department of Government Efficiency’s use of artificial intelligence.
DOGE is looking to eliminate up to half of all federal regulations by the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, according to internal government documents obtained by The Washington Post.
According to reports, the DOGE team has developed the “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool” to analyze roughly 200,000 federal regulations and identify which ones can be eliminated because they are no longer required by law. The tool has already flagged approximately 100,000 federal rules for potential removal.
The AI system has been tested at multiple federal agencies with remarkable speed. At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the tool completed “decisions on 1,083 regulatory sections” in under two weeks. At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the AI was used to write “100% of deregulations.”
The project is ambitious, and could be a massive win for the economy and taxpayers. DOGE estimates that eliminating unnecessary regulations could generate huge benefits.
Total regulatory compliance costs the United States $3.1 trillion annually, DOGE claimed. Removing rules not legally required could produce “up to $1.5 trillion in annual compliance savings” and unlock “$600 billion in new investment and $1.1 trillion in new government revenue from untapped economic activity.”
The traditional approach to repealing 100,000 regulations would require 3.6 million man-hours of legal and policy work, according to DOGE analysis. The AI tool could reduce this workload by 93 percent by automating tasks like generating legal drafts and analyzing public comment responses.
The tool was developed by engineers brought into government as part of Elon Musk’s DOGE project. Though Musk departed DOGE in May, the deregulation effort continues under the broader Trump administration agenda.
Trump issued an executive order on January 31 requiring agencies to “repeal 10 rules for every new rule issued.” Since then, departments have competed to cut regulations. The Transportation Department deleted 52 regulations and more than 73,000 words from the Federal Register in May. The Labor Department announced plans to eliminate more than 60 regulations this month.
White House spokesman Harrison Fields said “all options are being explored” to achieve the president’s deregulation goals. Fields noted, however, that “no single plan has been approved or green-lit” and cautioned that the work is “in its early stages and is being conducted in a creative way in consultation with the White House.”
“The DOGE experts creating these plans are the best and brightest in the business and are embarking on a never-before-attempted transformation of government systems and operations to enhance efficiency and effectiveness,” Fields added.
James Burnham, who served as chief attorney for DOGE and is now managing partner at King Street Legal, praised the ambitious approach.
“Creative deployment of artificial intelligence to advance the president’s regulatory agenda is one logical strategy to make significant progress in that finite amount of time,” Burnham wrote.
The project divides federal regulations into three categories: 50 percent are not required by law, 38 percent are statutorily mandated, and 12 percent are “Not Required but Agency Needs.” By ending rules that are unnecessary both legally and operationally, the government could recover $3.3 trillion a year, DOGE estimated.
Some federal employees have raised concerns about the AI tool’s accuracy. One employee who participated in the review process at the U.S. Housing and Urban Development branch said the AI made several errors in analyzing regulations. “There were a couple places where the AI said the language was outside of the statute, and actually, no — the AI read the language wrong, and it is actually correct,” the employee said.
A HUD spokesperson said no final decisions have been made and emphasized that “the intent of the developments is not to replace the judgment, discretion and expertise of staff but be additive to the process.”
The administration faces a tight timeline to implement the ambitious deregulation plan. Agencies are supposed to finish their regulation elimination lists by September 1, with the ultimate goal to “Relaunch America on Jan. 20, 2026.”
Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, noted the administration is “way behind where they were in 2017 on the numbers, no question about it.” Through July of this year, without one major regulatory repeal, the Trump administration would have actually increased regulatory costs by $1.1 billion and paperwork hours by 3.3 million.
“The White House wants us higher on the leader board,” said one federal official familiar with the deregulation efforts. “But you have to have staff and time to write the deregulatory notices, and we don’t. That’s a big reason for the holdup.”