FRED: Crowdsourcing presidential power
An idea to inspire someone at the DOGE
Trump’s cabinet appointments have often been victims of the departments they now run. They face the challenge of bending openly hostile organizations to their will, something Trump wasn’t always successful at during his first term. After all, he can’t fire everybody.
In the series Controlling Institutions With Machines I lay out a series of tactics for taking over enemy-controlled organizations using AI. These plans are optimized for environments where loyal manpower is scarce. The new Trump administration is ideally placed to execute such proposals as they not only face that exact problem, but also have the assistance of an ex-software engineer who helpfully owns an AI company. I doubt anyone in the new administration will ever see this substack, but if I’m wrong: good luck and I hope these thoughts can help.
On FOIA and its lady friends
"You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it."
— Tony Blair on his decision to pass Britain’s Freedom Of Information Act
Freedom Of Information Acts are a remarkable tool for uncovering conspiracies. They are so powerful that it’s not only journalists and bloggers that use them. Even politicians do, as they can be a more effective way to extract information from the government than actually asking civil servants directly.
FOIA requests are processed by dedicated officers inside organizations. This job attracts conscientious/agreeable types who often “go native” and start to sympathize more with the colleagues they see in the cafeteria every day than the public they’re supposed to be serving. They have many ways to frustrate the use of FOIA rights, and not only by egregious violations like literally tipping off conspirators. They can also just be incredibly inefficient, taking years to answer requests that by law should be done in days. Career politicians care little to fix the situation because FOIAs can be so easily turned on them, as Blair realized too late.
The result is predictable: deliberately poor record keeping that’s then used as an excuse to not answer questions. When the Hillary Clinton email fiasco was investigated in 2016 the report revealed the Office of the Secretary was comically dysfunctional, with emails being printed out and stored in unindexed boxes, or held in Exchange PST files that were corrupted and unreadable.
Thus Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency has a golden opportunity to kill two birds with one stone:
FOIA officers are not only highly inefficient but some weaponize that inefficiency against the public. The cost of staffing FOIA offices has been cited as a reason for not expanding the range of secrets that can be requested.
FOIA subversion is used to protect corrupt civil servants from being held accountable to Congress or the President.
We can do so much better.
FRED
What’s needed is a FOIA Robot for Enhancing Democracy. FRED’s goal is automating the jobs of FOIA officers using language models. Achieving it would:
Eliminate conspiracies between malign civil servants and their FOIA Ladies.
Slash turnaround time and cost, meaning:
People would file more requests, revealing more bad behavior.
FOIA coverage could be extended without hitting budget complaints.
Give departmental executives much tighter control over their own staff.
What does “tighter control” mean? If the cost of handling FOIA requests can be driven through the floor, policy compliance can be quickly checked. Want to ensure your employees actually have cancelled their beloved diversity trainings? File a FOIA against your own department asking for all the trainings since the policy took effect. The request will be processed automatically, with all matching emails/meetings/calendar events being found and summarized by LLMs.
If you get the enterprise IT right then it’s even possible that a new option becomes available: “standing” FOIAs. In other words, a FOIA request for which the answer is being continuously updated. This would provide an unprecedented level of executive control over staff, beyond anything ever seen before. Dashboards of important checks, written in English, would be applied continuously to every meeting, every chatroom and every email.
To be clear, FRED is a research project. It would start as a fast-fire exploration inside the DOGE, most likely working with X.ai. Centrally implemented FOIA processes would yield the best efficiency and process improvements, e.g. industrial scale scanning of printed documents. Nobody has done anything like FRED before and getting the models to behave might be hard. If I were leading the project I’d kick off several work streams in parallel:
Data. Individual departments can’t be allowed to manage data archival themselves. Administrator passwords to any digital system should be surrendered directly to FRED staff, who could then set up bulk import pipelines to cloud datacenters. There’s probably a lot of variance here but strong models can certainly automate some of the onboarding work. Scanning centers for paper records can be set up in the same manner Google used for Books.
Redacting. FOIA officers redact documents before release. Much of this is mechanical; a pipeline in which model decisions are compared to those made by FOIA officers opens the door to full automation once disagreement is minimized, but even before that it allows mismatches to trigger automatic requests for explanations from the officers, and those explanations can themselves be sanity checked by LLMs.
Search. The industry is good at text search, and LLMs are especially good at fuzzy matching via embeddings, extraction and summarization.
Workflows. Although the goal must be full automation, engineering is about rapid iteration on goals that deliver value immediately. A high quality GUI that helps officers with their jobs e.g. auto-suggesting redacts and explanations for them, not only enables later stages of the project by collecting thumbs up/down signals for training, but should also yield immediate efficiency improvements.
FRED is worth doing because knowledge is power. Instant, real-time and continuous FOIA request processing makes organizations almost entirely transparent, granting unprecedented levels of executive grip.