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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

> Trump administration officials have told some U.S. government employees that Elon Musk's DOGE team of technologists is using artificial intelligence to surveil at least one federal agency’s communications for hostility to President Donald Trump and his agenda, said two people with knowledge of the matter.

I think its entirely reasonable for an employer to monitor employee communications on company media channels. I've dealt with a few toxic employees in the past where their incessant complaining and passive sabotage of work is incredibly harmful to morale and work of others.

I don't really see how using AI is controversial other than it's being done more efficiently, flagging just blatant violations. Seems preferable and more respectful of privacy that having an employee read all communications manually and applying judgement.

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This comment bothers me a lot. It seems like you have a view that companies are at war with their pesky employees, and need to use whatever means to squash any bad apples.

Companies should be a place where people earn a livelyhood and contribute to society. They should feel safe at work and able to freely communicate any suggestions or complaints they have.

I want to feel safe at work and feel like I'm contributing to the mission of the company. Then log off and live my life.

I don't want politics discussed at work, it's annoying and a distraction. I don't want people badmouthing their job or work or company. All of these behaviors are toxic and I would guess 80% of people are like me.

That's what "feeling safe at work" means to me. Just mission focused. Happy hour is a different story, but at least with that you can choose to go and who to chat with.

> I don't want politics discussed at work, it's annoying and a distraction

This would be a ridiculous expectation if you were working for the federal government. Politics affect your work to an extreme level there. Not discussing politics at all is not discussing your job.

> I don't want people badmouthing their job or work or company. All of these behaviors are toxic and I would guess 80% of people are like me.

If your company was involved in something really bad, you'd rather just not know? If you worked for Theranos, Nikola, or Enron, you'd rather be able to continue on with your nose down than know what's going on?

I want to know the truth about my company. I don't want to be complicit in crimes or things that I consider unconscionable, and I don't consider willing ignorance a good excuse for partaking in unethical or illegal activity.

> I don't want politics discussed at work, it's annoying and a distraction.

This is a lot trickier when politics won’t stay out of your work. For example, almost every business is affected by the tariffs because such a massive tax increase affects almost everyone. On the article’s topic, someone at the EPA hired for professional skills around pollution, climate change, etc. under the current administration will regularly be faced with the choice between denying reality/law and being seen as political.

Some things really are bad, and "badmouthing" and pointing that out can be a productive thing. Thinking that anything that is against the "mission of the company" is toxic is a stance that I do not share.

It feels like your opinion is "boss is always right, just do what they say" (I apologize if I'm misreading that). The truth is that bosses are often wrong and need to be corrected.

…how is it possible to work for a political entity without discussing politics at work?

Has an LLM ever gotten something wrong in your experience? Now imagine you get fired because the magic autocomplete machine randomly decided that something you said had a bad vibe

I don't think an LLM has access to payroll or authority to fire anyone. It just flags and people review. Have you worked in a large organization? Have you ever had to fire anyone, or tried to get someone fired? It's not easy.

Judging by how many people DOGE has gotten fired, it doesn't seem that hard

As of April 1, 2025, approximately 60,000 federal employees have been forcibly terminated or laid off as part of the Trump administration's workforce reduction efforts. These terminations primarily targeted probationary employees—those hired, promoted, or transferred within the last year—who lack full civil service protections.

There are about 3m employees so this is about 2%.

This is pretty normal course of business for most organizations. Meta laid off 13% of workers in 2022-2023 and an additional 5% in 2025. Other tech companies did similar numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_mas...

"promoted, or transferred within the last year"

You normally want to keep the people you promote. You also normally want to keep the people you transferred to that new important project you spun up.

They reason they fired this specific classification is because it was easier to, not because there was any justification to fire them. I thought above you said it's hard to fire people without reason?

Yes and no – nearly half federal government's actual workforce is contractors, and contracts have been cancelled en masse. Here is data from 2017 -- the percentage is nearly 40%.

https://www.pogo.org/analysis/contractors-and-true-size-of-g...

The issue is, probationary in Gov doesn't mean what it means in Corporate speak. They do actually have most of the same protections which he ignored illegally.

> It's not easy.

This is pathetic. In the US, nearly everyone is an "At will" employee. It cannot be legally easy to fire someone.

You can fire your employees because you don't like their shirt. Do you understand that? There is NO REQUIRED REASON to fire nearly anyone in the US.

Meanwhile, for non-at-will employees like federal employees, all you need is "cause", in other words, a bullshit couple "bad" reviews or a PIP or similar.

Do you know why governments don't usually fire people? Because they don't exactly have the most productive employees lining up to work for below market rates.

The government doesn't fire workers because whoever you replace them with (if you even can at all) will likely be just as bad or worse. It's not because "It's hard" and I'm so sick of the whining.

> I think its entirely reasonable for an employer to monitor employee communications on company media channels.

Okay but we're talking about a government with protections around speech and privacy. What does this have to do with "company media channels"?

Trump isn't their employer and the whole narrative that they "report" to him is an executive order-based fiction. The departments are supposed to be independent, some wildly more than others, and the heads of the department control them and set the agenda.

I don't know, anytime I read anything like this it's a whack a mole.

> Trump / Doge / Musk is snooping

It's pretty normal to monitor communication channels

> for anti Trump / Elon communication

It's pretty normal to have informal speech codes at work, which include don't un-constructively criticize your employer or parent company.

> using AI

Okay, it just does what humans do except more efficiently

> but the AI is not compliant to some regulation

I don't know and I don't think you know either

> but they don't "report" to him

They're still part of the federal government. Again, I don't think its unreasonable and its certainly not productive

At a certain point I realize there aren't any real objections other than [orange | rocket] man bad.

There's a lot to criticize with this administration but criticizing absolutely everything, even when its entirely reasonable, doesn't help sway people's opinions. So when people read hysterical headlines about how the federal government is spying on federal employees by accessing their pay information, they just tune out.

The executive branch is really not supposed to have complete unrestrained control over the entire federal government.

The point about AI isn't about efficiency, it's about accountability. This administration already has a huge accountability problem, and the AI is another layer of "Oh, that wasn't really me who did that thing I did." This isn't just cynicism, the current admin is incapable of taking responsibility for anything they've done wrong (and perfectly willing to take full responsibility for things other people have done right).

> but criticizing absolutely everything, even when its entirely reasonable

Got it. But for a lot of us this is not entirely reasonable at all.

I don't know where I stand on this, but not everyone thinks that 100% on-task, uncritical, 0 conflict communication is essential or even normal for work.

It reminds me of an article that claimed Britain has become a more civil and less honest place in the last few decades. (The Economist, maybe?) Perhaps some workplaces are like that too. Whether it's a good thing or not, who knows. People clearly have their preference one way or the other.

This specific case is tied to complicated American politics, but I guess small versions of the same debate are happening in workplaces all over the world. Though maybe, ironically, not in the most intensely policed workplaces.

> flagging just blatant violations.

What is your basis for claiming this?

In particular, with the current state of the art, an AI could hallucinate a violation.

Do you think AI is hooked up to the their entire infra where they can act as an agent, file disciplinary complaints, put people on performance plans, etc?

Come on

Given the spectacular, mind-blowing incompetence of almost everything they've done so far, I 100% absolutely believe that they would automatically send out dismissals based upon a sentiment analysis flag.

So they're incompetent but can integrate an LLM to their entire human resources management, payroll, and administration system in a few months? Makes sense.

Yes, the people who have repeatedly fired vast numbers of critical people[1] and then begged for them to come back are outrageously incompetent. The people who keep posting laughably wrong values on their "savings", and who are cancelling contracts they actually can't, contracts that are critical, or contracts that ended years ago are spectacularly incompetent.

Hamfisting some AI bullshit to try to gangbang the government with Elon's own little AI creation isn't some massive undertaking, and I assume you must be new to this industry or something to think it is.

[1] Current estimates of DOGE firings are in the range of 280,000 employees, not the 60k the other guy keeps claiming. And they've fired critical, hugely valuable employees repeatedly (nuclear safety, bird flu remediation, etc), seemingly having no idea what they do or how they do it. They just manufacture a BS cause, including claiming people who haven't even started are being fired for performance reasons, and automate mass firings.

There are about 3m employees so this is about 2%. 2% is not vast.

I'd be curious to know what the prompt is. I'm sure it's just about flagging "blatant violations".

In every situation like this, always contemplate how the reception would be if the other side did it.

Like, we know the "but her emails" thing was the greatest example of bloviated hypocrisy in human history. This government has absolutely obliterated information security norms, and suddenly all of those fake concerns dissolved. Similarly there was a week-long outrage about Biden looking at his watch during a fallen servicemember repatriation. Trump didn't even show up to four fallen soldiers -- didn't even know about them almost a day later, presumably because to him they're suckers and losers -- and went golfing instead. Not a peep.

So if the Biden admin deployed an AI sentiment analysis that flagged and then fired any civil servant anywhere in the masses of government who went against any of their decrees, would you say "well that's their employer and they're toxic"? Really?

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