Elon Musk's DOGE is launching a new AI retirement system. It was built mostly under Biden
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has spent its first 100 days slashing government programs and firing employees. Yet Musk views DOGE not just as a downsizing force, but also as a team of technologically elite shock troops tasked with rapidly modernizing outdated government systems.
Bald eagle live cam update: Now you can watch Big Bear's famous eaglets leave the nest
These stunning photos show how nature came back after the world's largest dam removal project
'I'll never get out of this hole': Older Americans brace as DOE begins Social Security garnishments
One of DOGE's primary targets on that front is the Office of Personnel Management's antiquated retirement application system, which still relies on paper forms and manual processing. The system handles retirement applications and manages benefits for former federal employees and their families, coordinating closely with agency HR teams and payroll centers. DOGE and its allies inside the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) say they've now built and tested a fully digital, AI-enhanced replacement system, which they plan to launch across federal agencies on June 2.
But the plans rely heavily on a product built during the Biden administration called the Online Retirement Application (ORA) system, say two former OPM employees who recently left the agency.
A leaked planning document shared with Fast Company shows the ORA pilot launched in 2023 with a handful of agency HR and payroll offices, serving 'a few hundred' retirees. The plan under Biden was to roll out the ORA system government-wide in 2025.
The first source, who worked on retirement systems at OPM and spoke to Fast Company on the condition of anonymity, says that ORA is still just a prototype, and not built to support tens of thousands of real retirees. Yet one of the first actions OPM took when Trump came into office was to interrupt the development of ORA.
'They reduced support contracts and added a team of DOGE developers,' adds the second source, who until recently worked at OPM and also spoke on the condition of anonymity. 'There is now a 'war room' to accelerate the work.'
DOGE has kept its version of the ORA system largely under wraps. It remains unclear whether the team changed the original system's architecture or user experience, or how the system's AI components were developed, trained, or integrated. A White House official told Fox News that the AI met Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) requirements for securing and monitoring cloud-based services used by government agencies. (Neither DOGE nor OPM responded to Fast Company's requests for comment.)
The first ex-OPM source fears that DOGE, without fully understanding the federal retirement workflow, will simply roll out the ORA system as is. 'I think instead of testing it with some Department of Interior retirees, they're just slapping the system into being a requirement,' the source says. This would put the onus entirely on all retiring federal employees to correctly input their data and documents into the system without help from their agency HR department, according to the source.
Few dispute the need for modernization. The current system processes around 100,000 retirement applications annually—in a literal underground mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania. The paper-based workflow is infamously slow and prone to error, often causing months-long delays that can be devastating for retirees who depend on timely benefits. While DOGE cites a Trump executive order from February 11 as the mandate behind its work, the OPM's original ORA and digital records systems were responses to a 2021 Biden executive order aimed at modernizing federal technology.
To spearhead the retirement-focused effort, Musk reportedly tapped Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia, a close friend and fellow Trump supporter. Gebbia joined DOGE in late February, vowing to apply his 'designer brain and startup spirit' to build a paperless solution.
Since then, a team of DOGE agents has been working out of a command center at OPM, collaborating with Retirement Services personnel and select staff. OPM acting director Charles Ezell said in a May 7 memo that the new system had already processed 25 retirement claims without generating paper—a claim that Gebbia then echoed on X. Notably, Ezell referred to the system in the memo as the ORA, the system built under Biden.
Some experts suspect DOGE's version is little more than a minimum viable product (MVP)—a rough prototype meant to demonstrate potential. Former U.S. Digital Service engineer Kate Green notes that MVPs often depend on manual work-arounds and aren't ready for large-scale use. 'These MVPs often have manual steps or work-arounds for difficult parts of the app, and future development eliminates these steps to create something fully automated,' she tells Fast Company.
The second ex-OPM source says DOGE may be emphasizing flashy features—like ditching paper—while ignoring the real pain points, such as retirement applications with missing documents, missing signatures, or errors. 'Personally,' the source says, 'I think they are focusing just on paper because it seems like an easy win.'
This post originally appeared at fastcompany.comSubscribe to get the Fast Company newsletter: http://fastcompany.com/newsletters
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
11 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Gets Delightfully Catty On Trump-Musk Split
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) played the feud between President Donald Trump and former DOGE henchman Elon Musk for laughs on Thursday. (Watch the video below.) Approached by Spectrum News 1 about the fracture in their bromance, the smiling AOC said: 'Oh man, the girls are fighting, aren't they?' The progressive lawmaker could be forgiven for a little regressive humor. She has been one of the Democrats' most vocal opponents of Trump's so-called 'Big Beautiful Bill' ― the legislation that actually ignited the Trump-Musk row. Musk called the spending measure an abomination and once Trump finally expressed his disappointment in the Tesla magnate and Trump mega-donor, things turned personal between the two. The bill is being ironed out in the Senate and would reportedly ax 11 million people off Medicaid over time. Ocasio-Cortez had made a similar prediction last month. 'When this country wakes up in the morning, there will be consequences to pay for this,' she said at the time. But perhaps she didn't see the bill resulting in the breakup of DC's premier platonic power couple. For a moment anyway, it was something to crack wise about. AOC on Musk and Trump: "the girls are fighting aren't they ?"💀 — Winter Politics (@WinterPolitics1) June 6, 2025 Stephen Colbert Spots The Musk-Trump Feud Moment That Proves 'Things Are Bad' 1 Subtle Barb In Trump-Musk Blow-Out Has Dana Bash Saying 'Wow, Wow, Wow' 'My Prediction': Jimmy Kimmel Reveals Ugly Next Phase Of Trump-Musk Feud
Yahoo
11 minutes ago
- Yahoo
We're worrying about the wrong thing. Low birth rate isn't the crisis: Child care is.
Let's just get this out of the way: The birth rate is a red herring. It's been a common refrain that if the Trump administration and congressional leadership truly wanted to make it easier for families in America to grow and thrive, they would turn to policies like national paid leave, affordable child care, maternal health care and home and community-based services for our aging and disabled loved ones. They would be investing in early education and the caregiving workforce. They would be supporting commonsense accommodations like remote work. They would be growing social safety nets. But they've done none of that. Their response to child care is to send in grandma. They've said next to nothing about paid leave. What they apparently have suggested instead is both hilarious and dystopian. A medal for women with six or more children? Classes on your own menstrual cycle? Coupons for minivans? And instead of investing and building for the future, they're slashing and burning. From fertility and maternal health programs, to food and farm assistance, to Medicaid and Social Security, they're going after all the powerful things our country has built to sustain life. Elon Musk says the birth rate crisis is about the disappearance of civilization. I'd say he's already destroying its foundations. The real crisis is one of care. As baby boomers age, more and more of us are taking care of our parents and children all at the same time, with little help, and drowning financially and emotionally. No federal paid leave, in many counties without access to child care. The answer to the real crisis is not what we can gut and burn and take away from people, but what we can give them, the world we can create. My organization, Paid Leave for All, is asking people to envision their lives if they had the guarantee of paid family and medical leave ‒ if they knew no matter where they worked and the joy or loss they faced, they could maintain their life and their livelihood. Imagine the businesses and ventures that might be started, the families that could be sustained, the moments we wouldn't miss. Imagine the peace of mind, the paychecks kept, the lives saved. Opinion: Trump's $5,000 'baby bonus' isn't what new moms like me need What Musk, President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and beyond are suggesting isn't about any of that ‒ it's not about affording working families the security and dignity of being able to take care of themselves and each other. It's simply code for hatred and bigotry, driven less by concern for families than by a desire to preserve a demographic majority. But the good news? They're still at odds with supermajorities of Americans. They're overplaying their hand, ignoring the desperate real needs of working families and missing a political opportunity. In April, House Speaker Mike Johnson went to great lengths to try to kill a bipartisan measure to simply allow new parents in Congress to vote by proxy ‒ a pro-family protocol that would cost nothing. A lot of people had never heard of it, but message testing found that when you told people even a little bit about it and Johnson's unprecedented moves to kill it, their support for the measure jumped up to 23 points. This was true across every demographic group tested, across gender, race, age and ideology. What's more, their support for broader federal policies like paid family and medical leave shot up as well. Your Turn: Are you planning to have children? Why or why not? Here's what USA TODAY readers told us. | Opinion Forum In polling done in battleground states just before the 2024 election, there was record-high support for paid leave across party lines and walks of life, however you sliced it. That included 90% of independents, 96% of suburban women and 97% of low turnout Democrats. Commentary and post-election analyses have pointed to the family policies like paid leave and affordable care that would have offered tangible improvements in people's daily lives and stress, and could have changed the political landscape and outcomes. 'We didn't deliver what people wanted ‒ help with child care, help with elder care, more security in their lives,' said Ron Klain, a former chief of staff for Joe Biden. Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store. And that's the task ahead ‒ not just to respond to dangerous and very real threats to our families and communities, but to also counter with a vision of how much better our lives could be, and a plan to achieve it. To outline the damage they're doing to people's wallets and freedoms, and opportunities, and then to contrast with the policies that enable us to hold onto jobs and care for our own families. The desire to succeed in life, to be able to afford one, to be able to support your loved ones, is universal. It's not a liberal fantasy, it's an idea of strength and dignity. Making more babies by threat, faux incentives or even force is not a goal or a solution. But the idea of supporting families and allowing all of us to live healthier and richer lives is one we should be restoring front and center, and a conversation we should be having. This is the project facing all of us who actually care about the survival of civilization. Dawn Huckelbridge is the founding director of Paid Leave for All. You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page, on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Musk is wrong: Birth rate isn't the crisis. Child care is | Opinion
Yahoo
12 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Who would want to have babies under a Trump administration? Not me.
Despite declarations that something needs to be done about the declining birth rate in the United States, neither President Donald Trump nor the Republican Party has the desire to protect pregnant people. If they did, the Trump administration wouldn't have made its latest move to restrict abortion nationwide. On Tuesday, June 3, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rescinded a Biden-era policy that directed hospitals to provide emergency abortions if it was needed to stabilize a pregnant patient. The guidance and communications on it apparently 'do not reflect the policy of this Administration.' I, like many people who support abortion rights, know what this will lead to. It means more pregnant people will die. Does that reflect the policy of the administration? The Biden policy was implemented in 2022, following the fall of Roe v. Wade, and argued that hospitals receiving Medicare funding had to comply with the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA). The former administration argued that this included providing emergency abortions when they were needed to stabilize a patient, even in states that had severe abortion restrictions. Opinion: A brain dead pregnant Georgia woman is a horror story. It's Republicans' fault. This wasn't entirely a surprise. In 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas could ban virtually all abortions in the state, including abortions that would have occurred under the old EMTALA guidelines. Still, it's terrifying to see this crucial policy eliminated. It's already dangerous to be pregnant in the United States. Our maternal mortality rate is much higher than in other wealthy countries. Same with our infant mortality rate. This will only exacerbate these tragedies. In states with abortion bans, the risks are even greater. A study from the Gender Equity Policy Institute found that people living in states with abortion bans were twice as likely to die during or shortly after childbirth. This is also backed by anecdotal evidence, including the 2022 deaths of two women in Georgia after the state passed a six-week ban. A different study found that infant mortality rates increased in states with severe restrictions on abortion, including an increase in deaths due to congenital anomalies. The Trump administration does not care about what is medically necessary to save someone's life. They don't care about whether the children supposedly saved by rescinding this policy will grow up without their mother. They care about their perceived moral superiority. They care about controlling women. Why would anybody want to have a child under that Republican way of thinking? Opinion: We're worrying about the wrong thing. Low birth rate isn't the crisis: Child care is. I want to say I'm surprised that the Trump administration would allow women in need of emergency care to die. Yet this is clearly aligned with the Republican stance on abortion, just like it's aligned with the actions that the party has taken to make it harder for women to access necessary care. Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store. Whether you like it or not, abortion is a necessary part of health care. It saves lives. Alexis McGill Johnson, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, laid it out plainly. 'Women have died because they couldn't get the lifesaving abortion care they needed,' she said in a statement. 'The Trump administration is willing to let pregnant people die, and that is exactly what we can expect." Again, this is the administration that wants young women like me to have children and improve the country's birth rate. This is an administration that claims to care about women and children. I know I wouldn't want to have a child while Trump continues to make it unsafe to be pregnant and give birth. I hate that this is the reality. Follow USA TODAY columnist Sara Pequeño on X, formerly Twitter, @sara__pequeno You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page, on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump just made healthcare more dangerous for pregnant women | Opinion
