Trump’s targeting of USAID puts OpenAI’s agency work in doubt

The collateral damage of the Trump administration’s destruction of USAID may include a planned offering from one of the country’s most powerful artificial intelligence companies. 

FedScoop reported last year that USAID was the first customer for OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise. At the time, Vice President of Global Affairs Anna Makanju said the technology would “reduce administrative burdens for staff” and “make it easier for new and local organizations to partner with USAID.” Samantha Power, USAID’s administrator during the Biden administration, also met with Makanju in 2024. 

There were also discussions within the agency about sponsoring OpenAI’s federal authorization through FedRAMP, the program that helps standardize the cybersecurity review of government cloud products, according to two sources. Those conversations appeared to come from the growing working relationship between the agency and the large language model developer. 

As the Trump administration’s targeting of USAID continues, it’s unclear what will happen to OpenAI’s pilot program — or if the company, whose generative AI platform is in high demand, will find an alternative path to gaining a FedRAMP authorization. Large swaths of the information technology team at USAID remain on administrative leave, according to one source.

Just last month, OpenAI said it would continue to pursue authorization through FedRAMP while also announcing a new service called ChatGPT Gov. No service directly offered by OpenAI is currently listed in the FedRAMP Marketplace, though federal agencies can use the company’s GPT-4o model through Microsoft’s Azure Government cloud. 

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.  

The company’s uncertain status with FedRAMP isn’t the only potential AI-related casualty with the program. With the rescission of the Biden administration’s executive order on artificial intelligence, an emerging technology framework established by FedRAMP — and meant to prioritize generative AI — was abruptly shut down. 

House bill would ban DeepSeek on agency workers’ devices

Federal employees would be banned from using the Chinese artificial intelligence platform DeepSeek on their government-issued devices under new legislation from a bipartisan group of House lawmakers.

The No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act, introduced by Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., Darin LaHood, R-Ill., and 16 of their House colleagues Friday, comes after weeks of panic in Silicon Valley following the revelation that the Chinese startup’s AI models were comparable if not more advanced than offerings from U.S. companies. 

DeepSeek, a low-cost, open-source AI model, has since reported difficulties in registering new users thanks to “large-scale malicious attacks” on its services. Meanwhile, a security issue at the company has exposed sensitive internal data, researchers at Wiz found. 

Gottheimer, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a press release that there is “deeply disturbing evidence” that China is “using DeepSeek to steal the sensitive data of U.S. citizens.” 

“This is a five-alarm national security fire,” he continued. “We must get to the bottom of DeepSeek’s malign activities. We simply can’t risk [China] infiltrating the devices of our government officials and jeopardizing our national security.”

Gottheimer connected the rise of DeepSeek to TikTok’s proliferation in U.S. markets, saying that the country “cannot allow it to happen again.” LaHood, also a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, raised additional concerns about government workers’ data ending up in the wrong hands.

“DeepSeek’s generative AI program acquires the data of U.S. users and stores the information for unidentified use by” China, LaHood said. “Under no circumstances can we allow a [Chinese] company to obtain sensitive government or personal data.”

According to Axios, DeepSeek has already been banned on Senate devices. And in New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul on Monday banned DeepSeek from state government devices. 

The concern over DeepSeek from U.S. lawmakers follows warnings from federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies about Chinese hacking operations that have been ongoing for years, including pre-positioning in critical infrastructure networks.

Trump DOJ seeks reversal of judge’s order to block access to Treasury systems

A day after a federal judge in New York cut off Department of Government Efficiency access to Treasury Department financial systems, the Trump administration asked a different judge to reverse what it called a “remarkable intrusion” on the executive branch’s constitutional powers.

In an early Saturday filing, Judge Paul A. Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction in response to a lawsuit filed by 19 state attorneys general that sought a temporary restraining order to halt Elon Musk’s DOGE surrogates — defined as political or “special government” employees — from accessing Bureau of Fiscal Services payment systems.

Allowing that access to continue, the state AGs argued, opened the door for “the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking.” Information stored in those systems includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, birth places, home addresses and telephone numbers, email addresses, and bank account information of Americans who have transacted with the federal government.

Engelmayer granted the emergency relief, and ordered any person in that category of employees who accessed that information since Jan. 20 to “immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.”

On Sunday, the Department of Justice lawyers asked Judge Jeannette Vargas, also of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York, to dissolve, clarify or modify the temporary restraining order, writing that the injunction was “markedly overbroad” and contained “no sound reason that it should extend to Treasury’s leadership.” 

The Trump lawyers contended that there is no basis for drawing a difference between civil servants and political appointees, and preventing the latter from performing its functions “is an extraordinary and unprecedented judicial interference with a Cabinet Secretary’s ability to oversee the Department he was constitutionally appointed to lead.”

The temporary restraining order and Trump’s pushback against it are just the latest bit of legal fallout from Musk’s move to unleash his underlings on the sensitive Treasury systems. A coalition of union groups sued the Treasury Department and Secretary Scott Bessent to cut off DOGE access, and a federal judge last week partially blocked that access.  

The potential security failures involved with DOGE access to Americans’ personal and financial data have left cybersecurity experts aghast and led to legislative action from House Democrats.

US AI Safety Institute taps Scale AI for model evaluation

The U.S. AI Safety Institute has selected Scale AI as the first third-party evaluator authorized to assess AI models on its behalf, opening a new channel for testing.

That agreement will allow a broader range of model builders to access voluntary evaluation, according to a Scale AI release shared with FedScoop ahead of the Monday announcement. Participating companies will be able to test their models once and, if they choose, share those results with AI safety institutes around the world.

Criteria for those evaluations will be developed jointly by the AI data labeling company and the AISI. For Scale’s part, that work will be led by its research arm, the Safety, Evaluation, and Alignment Lab, or SEAL. Per the announcement, the evaluations will look at performance in areas such as math, reasoning, and AI coding.

“SEAL’s rigorous evaluations set the standard for how cutting-edge AI systems meet the highest standards,” Summer Yue, director of research at Scale AI, said in a statement. “This agreement with the U.S. AISI is a landmark step, providing model builders an efficient way to vet the technology before reaching the real world.”

Thus far, the voluntary testing out of the AI Safety Institute, which is housed in the Department of Commerce, has been with large-scale AI companies. OpenAI and Anthropic formally signed testing agreements with the safety body in August that would allow the AISI to access new models prior to and after their release for testing and risk mitigation. In November, the AISI and its counterpart in the U.K. released their first joint evaluation of Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

In its announcement, Scale AI called the agreement a “new phase in public-private sector collaboration” and highlighted the ability for companies to choose whether they want to share their test results with the AISI. Without third-party testing, the release said, governments would need to spend time and money building out their own testing infrastructure and still wouldn’t be likely to meet the growing demand.

The announcement comes as AI leaders across the world are set to gather in Paris for the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit this week, including Scale AI’s CEO, Alexandr Wang.

Scale AI is a San Francisco-based company that primarily provides training data for AI and helps other companies manage their models. It also has prior experience working with the government on testing and evaluation. Last year, the Department of Defense selected Scale AI for a one-year contract to come up with a way to test and evaluate its large language models. 

Musk, DOGE access to Treasury systems targeted in House Democrats’ bill

More than 140 House Democrats are behind a new bill that would bar “unlawful access” to payment systems within the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service, a response to infiltrations by DOGE liaisons into systems containing the personal and financial information of millions of Americans.

The Taxpayer Data Protection Act from Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., and 141 of her Democratic colleagues would prohibit the Treasury secretary from granting administrative control, use or access to any agency payment system or public money receipt, with exceptions given to eligible department officials, employees or contractors.

The legislation comes following reports that a pair of DOGE-connected “special government employees” — one who has since departed due to the revelation of racist social media posts — were granted access to Bureau of Fiscal Service systems by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. 

A coalition of union groups sued to cut off DOGE’s access to the systems, which reportedly contain the names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, birth places, home addresses and telephone numbers, email addresses, and bank account information of Americans who have transacted with the federal government. A federal judge ruled Thursday that the DOGE surrogates could be granted “read-only” access to Bureau of Fiscal Service systems “as needed for the performance” of their respective duties.

Stevens, who served as chief of staff on an Obama administration auto rescue task force that reported to the Treasury Department, said in a statement that her time in that position made her “intimately familiar” with the agency’s critical role in the economy and in “securing the full faith and credit of our nation.” Elon Musk and any other “unelected billionaire with zero government experience,” she said, should be nowhere near Americans’ private data.

“It begs the question, what exactly is [Musk] trying to accomplish? Research on his opponents? Stopping payments on Americans’ earned benefits like Social Security and Medicare?” Stevens said. “This bill makes crystal clear the level of experience and security training those granted access to our nation’s bill paying system must have and will stop unlawful incursions and protect the American people.”

The bill also calls on the inspector general of the Treasury to investigate and submit a report to Congress on any unauthorized uses of agency payment systems. The report should include detailed descriptions of any instances of stopped payments during the period of unauthorized use, as well as a risk assessment gauging threats to privacy, national security or cybersecurity.

Cybersecurity and government experts have expressed grave concerns about the access granted to DOGE, with some comparing the Musk-directed actions to an ongoing data breach.

The Treasury-specific effort from House Democrats follows similar calls in the upper chamber to cut off DOGE access to agency IT systems; the Office of Personnel Management, the Education Department and USAID are among the others where Musk’s underlings have reportedly been burrowing.

Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and five of his fellow Senate Democrats sent a letter Friday to the White House, asking President Donald Trump’s chief of staff and counsel to have DOGE “immediately pause their work within all federal agencies.” Nextgov first reported the news of that letter. 

Energy CIO replaced with SpaceX engineer as DOGE probes department’s systems

The Department of Energy on Friday replaced its chief information officer with a network engineer from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, FedScoop has learned.

Dawn Zimmer — who’d been serving as Energy CIO since Ann Dunkin resigned from the role as the Biden administration left office — has been removed from the role by the department’s leadership, two sources with direct knowledge of the move told FedScoop. Zimmer was hired as Energy’s principal deputy CIO in November, and she has returned to that role.

With Zimmer removed as acting CIO, Energy leadership has appointed Ryan Riedel to the role, according to one of the sources, who also shared a screenshot of Riedel listed as CIO in the department’s email directory.

Riedel lists his current employment as a lead network security engineer at SpaceX on his LinkedIn. He joined the company in 2020 after previously serving at U.S. Army Cyber Command and in the U.S. Navy as an IT specialist, his profile shows.

The change comes amid reports that members of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency have entered the Department of Energy and at least one is accessing its IT systems. CNN reported Friday that Secretary Chris Wright granted that DOGE member system access, despite objections from the department’s IT and legal teams, who said the Musk associate didn’t have the proper background check to do so.

In the first weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term, Musk’s DOGE team has been entering agencies across the government — including the Office of Personnel Management, USAID, the Treasury and Education departments, and several others — and going toe-to-toe with IT officials as it looks to gain access to sensitive systems and data.

Zimmer isn’t the first person acting in a CIO role to have been removed amid a DOGE takeover. Melvin Brown II, who similarly stepped in as CIO at OPM as his predecessor resigned at the change of administration, was removed from his position and replaced.

The Department of Energy did not return FedScoop’s request for comment prior to publication.

This article has been updated to reflect the Zimmer, who was acting as CIO while the position was vacant, has returned to her primary role as principal deputy CIO.

Student group asks federal court to halt DOGE access to Education Department data

A student group is suing the Department of Education for what they say is the disclosure of sensitive personal and financial information to the Department of Government Efficiency by granting the Elon Musk-led group access to internal systems that hold federal student financial aid information. 

The University of California Student Association filed its complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief Friday, asking the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to put an immediate stop to the Education Department’s alleged violation of federal records laws regarding the protection of personal information. 

UCSA alleged in its lawsuit that the Department of Education’s actions violated the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Internal Revenue Code by handing access to financial aid records to DOGE.

On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that the members of DOGE fed sensitive Education Department data — including personally identifiable information for those who manage grants and sensitive internal financial data from the agency — into an artificial intelligence software to assess its programs and spending. The Post found that lower-level department staffers were directed by agency leadership to allow DOGE to access sensitive financial data.

“The scale of the intrusion into individuals’ privacy is enormous and unprecedented,” the complaint states. “The personal data of over 42 million people lives in these systems. These are people who trusted ED with their sensitive personal information when they filled out the [Free Application for Federal Student Aid] and applied for federal student loans and grants, in reliance on the agency’s rules and other representations.”

UCSA alleged that DOGE-affiliated access to that information for an unknown amount of time could mean the public has no assurance that their sensitive information — and potentially the information of a parent or spouse — will receive appropriate protection. 

“And because Defendants’ actions and decisions are shrouded in secrecy, individuals do not have even basic information about what personal or financial information Defendants are sharing with outside parties or how their information is being used,” the complaint states. 

Under the Privacy Act’s protection, an agency is required to give a System of Records Notice (SORN) in the Federal Register that outlines the existence and character of the SORN, the lawsuit states. Agencies must give at least 30 days’ notice of any new or intended uses of a system’s information and give the public the opportunity to submit written data, arguments and views to the agency before publishing a SORN. 

Additionally, agency employees and authorized users who access Federal Student Aid systems are required to acknowledge required compliance with applicable rules, which includes protecting FSA information from unauthorized access and disclosure, the lawsuit notes. 

The plaintiff also said that because personal records — including federal tax information — are stored on the agency’s FUTURE Act System, the Department of Education’s actions violate the Internal Revenue Code. The department is held to the code for returns and return information, which includes a taxpayer’s identity, physical address and other data, and is subject to confidentiality. 

While an executive order from President Donald Trump established DOGE and ordered USDS to access agency records and systems along with unclassified data, the complaint states that the Trump administration has not formally identified the new U.S. DOGE Service administrator or listed the individuals who are involved in the USDS Temporary Organization.

NextGov/FCW reported that employees who were a part of USDS (formerly U.S. Digital Service) have not been included in the recent actions reportedly carried out by the DOGE team, such as its works at the Office of Personnel Management, USAID, the Department of Treasury,  among others.

OPM asks agencies to identify career positions, low-performing employees

The Office of Personnel Management released multiple memorandums this week that continue the Trump administration’s push to shift agencies away from career employees and toward more political positions across the government.

OPM asked agencies in a Wednesday memo to identify all Senior Executive Service (SES) positions and make requests to keep those people in career roles if the agency head believes the “President’s goals and priorities would be better served by keeping” the status quo. 

OPM said the Trump administration received reports that agencies near the end of the Biden administration redesignated SES positions that are traditionally held by noncareer employees, labeling them as positions that can only be held by career employees under the titles “general” or “career reserved.” Another OPM memo released this week pushed to classify chief information officers as general employees.

“Positions that, in the first Trump administration, were seen as appropriately held by noncareer appointees, or by either career or noncareer appointees, should retain that status under the current administration,” the Wednesday memo stated. 

Agencies have 45 days to report the positions identified in a review of all agency SES positions that were either designated as general on the last day of the first Trump administration or were general-designated SES positions then filled with political appointments “for a majority of the prior administration’s tenure.”

In a Thursday memo, OPM gave agencies until March 7 to send a report detailing employee performance metrics that specifically focus on those who have received “less than a ‘fully successful’ performance rating in the past three years,” with an individual’s name, title, pay plan, agency, and duty station included. 

“OPM is developing new performance metrics for evaluating the federal workforce that aligns with the priorities and standards in the President’s recent executive orders,” the Thursday memo stated. “All agencies should submit data regarding their performance management plans and policies — including those contained in collective bargaining agreements.”

As OPM develops metrics to evaluate the federal workforce, the memo said that agencies should identify any barriers to ensuring that agency performance plans make “meaningful distinctions based on relative employee performance” and that agencies have the ability to “swiftly terminate poor performing employees who cannot or will not improve.”

The memo also asked agencies to report to OPM any existing regulations, agency policies or terms set in collective bargaining agreements that would impede performance plans from making “meaningful distinctions based on relative employee performance,” or hinder an agency’s ability to “swiftly separate low-performing employees.”

Senate confirms Russell Vought to lead OMB in party-line vote

Despite an overnight effort on the Senate floor from Democratic lawmakers to derail Russell Vought’s path to becoming Office of Management and Budget director, the Project 2025 co-author secured every Republican vote Thursday and was confirmed by a 53-47 tally to lead the White House office once again.

Vought, who also served as OMB director during the final six months of President Donald Trump’s first term, now regains control of the White House office charged with coordinating the administration’s budget and policy efforts, as well as overseeing IT, procurement, agency performance and financial management across the federal government. 

Democrats put up a 30-hour floor fight against Vought, one of the architects of the Heritage Foundation’s playbook to dismantle the federal government. Leading up to his confirmation, Vought faced withering questioning from Senate Democrats during hearings before the chamber’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and Budget committees, particularly about policies spelled out in Project 2025 and for saying in a private speech that “we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., ranking member of the chamber’s budget committee, said during Wednesday’s floor proceedings that Vought “views federal workers ‘as the villains’ and seeks to replace non-partisan, professional civil servants with corrupt lackeys valued for their loyalty over their expertise.” 

“Vought’s policies are already hurting communities across our country — in red, blue, and purple states,” he continued. “And it’s clear that he’s willing to raid our Treasury to line the pockets to enrich the already richest Americans, leaving working families in the cold.”

Before Thursday’s vote, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., chided Democrats for making arguments against Vought that he said lacked “self-reflection, because over the last four years, there have been a lot of times when the executive branch went around the Congress or tried to rewrite the laws passed.”

“The previous administration, an administration of a different political party, came to some very aggressive conclusions with respect to how they wanted to modify and change and alter laws passed by this institution, the United States Senate,” said Thune, who pointed specifically to the Biden administration’s handling of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program. 

During his confirmation hearings, Vought dodged Democratic questioning about the Schedule F employment classification, which makes it easier for a president to fire civil servants, and left the door open for a reexamination of telework policies in agency collective bargaining agreements.

Vought’s sidestepping at those hearings foreshadowed early Trump administration actions targeting the federal workforce. On his first day in office, Trump restored Schedule F — rebranded as Schedule Policy/Career — and ordered a return to in-person work for agency employees. An Office of Personnel Management memo later said some telework and remote work arrangements in collective bargaining agreements were “unlawful.”

In another policy aimed at slashing the federal workforce, OPM presented a “deferred resignation offer” to agency staffers, though a federal judge on Thursday paused the deadline. 

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said on the Senate floor Wednesday that Vought’s goals as OMB director are “not secret, nor are they subtle.”

“We know he is planning for cuts beyond anything this country has ever seen, and we know, if Russ Vought gets his way and gets his hands on the nation’s funding again, he will not just draw blood, he will cut programs families rely on down to the bone,” she said.

Murray also railed against Vought for “already putting his agenda in place” despite not being confirmed to his position until Thursday. She pointed specifically to an OMB memo last month that paused federal grants, loans and other assistance that reportedly had metadata indicating it had been written by people with links to Project 2025. The White House later rescinded that memo, though some spending freezes have reportedly continued. 

The Trump administration’s efforts to “get rid of thousands of federal workers through firings,” issue “scam buyout” offers and “trying to illegally abolish entire agencies with the stroke of the pen has Project 2025 written all over it,” Murray said.  

Democratic lawmakers were particularly incensed by Vought’s unwillingness to disavow impoundment — the practice of delaying or canceling appropriations signed into law. Refusing to release appropriated funds undercuts Congress and violates the law, Democrats and the vast majority of legal experts have said. 

“This is not about liking or not liking what Mr. Vought has written, what he stands for, what his policy positions are, though I clearly disagree with those,” Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., said Wednesday. “This is about whether or not we are going to abide by the systems of law in this country that say that we have a separation of powers, and that the power of the Senate and Congress, the power of the purse that rests in the Senate and the Congress, that we keep that power. That is an institutional prerogative that I think is on the line.”

House lawmakers take another swing at border technology bill

As the Trump administration’s crackdown on the southern border begins, a bipartisan pair of border-state lawmakers are re-introducing legislation they say would accelerate the use of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies to strengthen enforcement.

The Emerging Innovative Border Technologies Act from Reps. Lou Correa, D-Calif., and Morgan Luttrell, R-Texas, passed the House last year but stalled out on the Senate’s legislative calendar in December. 

In an interview with FedScoop, Correa said the bill is aimed at cutting through the “purchasing acquisition bureaucracy” to ensure the Department of Homeland Security gets access to the best, most cost-effective technology to secure the border as quickly as possible. 

The ranking member on the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border Security & Enforcement, Correa pointed to the “fast pace” in which Ukraine has acquired tech in its fight against Russia as an example of not being “tied down by bureaucracies.”

“We keep talking about building a very expensive wall … which, by the way, has continued to be built since the days of Clinton,” Correa said. “So I want to see our defense of our country to be more … flexible to react to the threats at the moment.”

The bill, shared exclusively with FedScoop, would require the Homeland Security secretary to submit a comprehensive plan to Congress detailing how the agency could leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning and nanotechnology to more effectively patrol the border.

Recent advancements in specific technologies would also be explored by DHS under the bill, including manned aircraft sensors and unmanned aerial systems, a host of surveillance technologies, such as tower-based and mobile surveillance systems, miniature satellites and long-term evolution broadband.  

Customs and Border Protection innovation teams, meanwhile, would be able to pilot various emerging technologies along specific border regions, a move aimed at providing agents with better tools to perform their jobs. 

Luttrell said in an interview with FedScoop that he and Correa are working on finding a Senate companion for the bill. Given Republicans’ trifecta of power in Washington, he’s optimistic about its prospects, especially since the legislation was tailored to “run parallel” with President Donald Trump’s executive order on securing the nation’s borders.  

That day-one EO calls for the buildout of a “physical wall” and other barriers to be “monitored and supported” by law enforcement staffers and technology. The DHS secretary should leverage “any available technologies” to determine the status of border crossers, the order states.

The bill, Luttrell said, is all about advancing technologies inside of DHS at a time when “cartels and all the bad actors globally are really moving in the tech space, or in the cyber metaverse.” Those groups are “using those capabilities to defeat us.” 

“It’s unconventional warfare,” he added. “It’s really guerrilla warfare tactics at the border. [DHS needs] every asset they can have.”