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U.S. President Donald Trump looks on during a signing ceremony on AI at the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on December 11, 2025.to write federal transportation regulations, according to U.
S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers.The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase “exciting new AI tools available to DOT rule writers to help us do our job better and faster.”. Gregory Zerzan, the agency’s general counsel, said at that meeting that President Donald Trump is “very excited about this initiative.” Zerzan seemed to suggest that the DOT was at the vanguard of a broader federal effort, calling the department the “point of the spear” and “the first agency that is fully enabled to use AI to draft rules.” Zerzan appeared interested mainly in the quantity of regulations that AI could produce, not their quality. “We don’t need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don’t even need a very good rule on XYZ,” he said, according to the meeting notes. “We want good enough.” Zerzan added, “We’re flooding the zone.” These developments have alarmed some at DOT. The agency’s rules touch virtually every facet of transportation safety, including regulations that keep airplanes in the sky, prevent gas pipelines from exploding and stop freight trains carrying toxic chemicals from skidding off the rails. Why, some staffers wondered, would the federal government outsource the writing of such critical standardsThe answer from the plan’s boosters is simple: speed. Writing and revising complex federal regulations can take months, sometimes years. But, with DOT’s version of Google Gemini, employees could generate a proposed rule in a matter of minutes or even seconds, two DOT staffers who attended the December demonstration remembered the presenter saying. In any case, most of what goes into the preambles of DOT regulatory documentsZerzan reiterated the ambition to accelerate rulemaking with AI at the meeting last week. The goal is to dramatically compress the timeline in which transportation regulations are produced, such that they could go from idea to complete draft ready for review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in just 30 days, he said. That should be possible, he said, because “it shouldn’t take you more than 20 minutes to get a draft rule out of Gemini.”represents a new front in the Trump administration’s campaign to incorporate artificial intelligence into the work of the federal government. This administration is not the first to use AI; federal agencies have been gradually stitching the technology into their workNone of those documents, however, called explicitly for using AI to write regulations, as DOT is now planning to do.The department has used AI to draft a still-unpublished Federal Aviation Administration rule, according to a DOT staffer briefed on the matter. Skeptics say that so-called large language models such as Gemini and ChatGPT shouldn’t be trusted with the complicated and consequential responsibilities of governance, given that those models are prone to error and incapable of human reasoningand wring efficiencies out of a slow-moving federal bureaucracy. Such optimism was on display in a windowless conference room in Northern Virginia earlier this month, where federal technology officials, convened at anadopting an “AI culture” in government and “upskilling” the federal workforce to use the technology. Those federal representatives included Justin Ubert, division chief for cybersecurity and operations at DOT’s Federal Transit Administration, who spoke on a panel about the Transportation Department’s plans for “fast adoption” of artificial intelligence. Many people see humans as a “choke point” that slows down AI, he noted. But eventually, Ubert predicted, humans will fall back into merely an oversight role, monitoring “AI-to-AI interactions.” Ubert declined to speak toA similarly sanguine attitude about the potential of AI permeated the presentation at DOT in December, which was attended by more than 100 DOT employees,Brimming with enthusiasm, the presenter told them that Gemini can handle 80% to 90% of the work of writing regulations,To illustrate this, the presenter asked for a suggestion from the audience of a topic on which DOT may have to write a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, a public filing that lays out an agency’s plans to introduce a new regulation or change an existing one. He then plugged the topic keywords into Gemini, which produced a document resembling a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. It appeared, however, to be missing the actual text that goes into the Code of Federal Regulations, one staffer recalled. The presenter expressed little concern that the regulatory documents produced by AI could contain so-called hallucinations — erroneous text that issuch as Gemini — according to three people present. In any case, that’s where DOT’s staff would come in, he said. “It seemed like his vision of the future of rulemaking at DOT is that our jobs would be to proofread this machine product,” one employee said.A spokesperson for the DOT did not respond to a request for comment; Cohen and Zerzan also did not respond to messages seeking comment. A Google spokesperson did not provide a comment. The December presentation left some DOT staffers deeply skeptical. Rulemaking is intricate work, they said, requiring expertise in the subject at hand as well as in existing statutes, regulations and case law. Mistakes or oversights in DOT regulations could lead to lawsuits or even injuries and deaths in the transportation system.But all that seemed to go ignored by the presenter, attendees said. “It seems wildly irresponsible,” said one, who, like the others, requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. Mike Horton, DOT’s former acting chief artificial intelligence officer, criticized the plan to use Gemini to write regulations, comparing it to “having a high school intern that’s doing your rulemaking.” Noting the life-or-death stakes of transportation safety regulations, Horton said the agency’s leaders “want to go fast and break things, but going fast and breaking things means people are going to get hurt.” Academics and researchers who track the use of AI in government expressed mixed opinions about the DOT plan. If agency rule writers use the technology as a sort of research assistant with plenty of supervision and transparency, it could be useful and save time. But if they cede too much responsibility to AI,in critical regulations and run afoul of a requirement that federal rules be built on reasoned decision-making. “Just because these tools can produce a lot of words doesn’t mean that those words add up to a high-quality government decision,”“It’s so tempting to try to figure out how to use these tools, and I think it would make sense to try. But I think it should be done with a lot of skepticism.”the exodus of subject-matter experts from government as a result of the administration’s cuts to the federal workforce last year.“Writing is automated,” the presentation read. DOGE’s AI program “automatically drafts all submission documents for attorneys to edit.” DOGE and Musk did not respond to requests for comment. The White House did not answer a question about whether the administration is planning to use AI in rulemaking at other agencies as well.As for DOT’s “point of the spear” claim, two of those officials expressed skepticism.“I think it’s very much a marketing thing.”Progressive nonprofits are the latest target caught in Trump’s crosshairs. With the aim of eliminating political opposition, Trump and his sycophants are working to curb government funding, constrain private foundations, and even cut tax-exempt status from organizations he dislikes.We can only resist Trump’s attacks by cultivating a strong base of support. The right-wing mediasphere is funded comfortably by billionaire owners and venture capitalist philanthropists. At Truthout, we have you.Please take a meaningful action in the fight against authoritarianism: make a one-time or monthly donation to Truthout. If you have the means, please dig deep.This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.on the black market for temporary license plates led to enacted or proposed laws in three states as well as civil penalties and criminal investigations. Previously, Coburn was a reporter at, where his reporting on wrongdoing in Long Island local governments spurred investigations and reforms. Coburn’s reporting has received a George Polk Award, an IRE Award, a Sidney Award, a Deadline Club Award and other distinctions. He was also a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.Truthout must raise $25,000 for our basic publishing costs this month. We are appealing to our readers to make a one-time or monthly donation.
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