The era of small government is over.

Anyone who tells you differently is selling you a lie.

Case in point: Donald Trump promised to shrink the federal government.

But what if Trump’s pledge to cut the federal work force wasn’t really about eliminating government bureaucracy but outsourcing it to the AI tech sector?

What if Trump, with the backing of a self-serving industry eager to automate government, is instead helping to build a government that no longer needs as many human beings to operate it?

What we are watching unfold is the construction of a government that requires fewer human beings to carry out its will, fewer human beings to question its orders, and fewer human beings to stand in the way when efficiency collides with legality, morality or constitutional restraint.

That is the real danger of automating government.

What is taking shape is a government that may employ fewer human beings while possessing exponentially greater power to surveil, process, classify, investigate and control the population.

Indeed, the administration has now launched America.gov, an AI-powered centralized digital gateway through which Americans will eventually interact with federal agencies and complete government transactions. The White House boasts that it will allow the federal government to “do its own paperwork.”

Thus, the concern is not the technology itself but what happens when government begins using it to eliminate the human restraints that constitutional government depends upon.

We are rapidly moving from a society ruled by laws and due process to one ruled increasingly by software.

The result is a system in which government no longer governs. It processes.

Your application. Your tax return. Your disability claim. Your government records request. Your threat profile.

Perhaps eventually your guilt or innocence.

And, if some military planners have their way, whether you qualify as a target.

This is where the supposed efficiency of artificial intelligence collides head-on with the Constitution.

The Constitution deliberately places obstacles between government power and the individual.

Before the police may search your home, they generally need a warrant. Before the government may imprison you, it must give you an opportunity to challenge the accusations. Government power is deliberately divided so that one branch can restrain another.

All of that takes time.

Artificial intelligence promises to cut through the delays, obstacles and human steps that slow government down.

That is marvelous if you’re trying to schedule an appointment. It is terrifying when the government is making decisions about your liberty—or your life.

By doing what the police state has historically lacked the manpower and resources to do quickly, AI surveillance is already reorienting our world into one in which the surveillance state no longer needs enough people to watch everyone. It needs enough computing power.

That distinction allows government power—and government abuse—to operate on a scale the Founders could scarcely have imagined.

We are already seeing glimpses of this future.

Federal agencies are already experimenting with AI to review Freedom of Information Act requests and recommend which portions of government records should be withheld from the public. Customs and Border Protection is testing AI-assisted redaction tools, while other agencies are developing similar systems. Human reviewers are still involved, but the trajectory is unmistakable: tasks requiring judgment about what the public may know are increasingly becoming candidates for automation.

The stakes become far greater once AI moves from paperwork to policing and warfare.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon clashed with Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI system, after Anthropic insisted on maintaining restrictions against two uses of its technology: mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

The issue was not whether artificial intelligence could assist military personnel.

It was whether there must always remain a human being responsible for certain decisions.

That question became even more urgent in September, when the United States and Russia opposed provisions under discussion at the United Nations that would have required human review of AI-generated military targets and imposed stronger requirements concerning the predictability and reliability of autonomous weapons systems.

The consequences of that rush toward machine-speed warfare are no longer hypothetical.

In February, U.S. missiles struck the Shajarah Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing more than 150 people, including at least 120 children. Outdated intelligence classified the school as a military target.

According to reporting on the Pentagon’s internal investigation, the flawed target was fed into Maven, the military’s AI-assisted targeting system. Officials reportedly relied too heavily on the technology to identify stale or contradictory intelligence.

The machine did not simply wake up one morning and decide to bomb a school. Human beings built a system that placed a premium on speed, automation and scale—and then gave it priority over human judgment and careful vetting.

That distinction matters. It is also precisely the danger.

This is why Trump’s assurances that AI companies can largely police themselves should provide little comfort.

The Founders knew better than to trust power to police itself. That is one of the central premises of the Constitution.

The Founders did not assume that those entrusted with power would always restrain themselves. They divided power among competing branches because they understood that good intentions are not a safeguard against tyranny.

Artificial intelligence does not repeal the oldest lesson in the history of government: power requires limits because power will always seek to expand.

This is where the campaign to shrink the federal workforce takes on an entirely different significance.

We may be building a smaller federal workforce and a larger government machine.

Trump will not be president forever. Neither will the politicians who come after him.

But the AI infrastructure being erected now—the databases, automated systems, surveillance capabilities, digital gateways and government relationships with technology companies—will be inherited by every future administration.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, once those powers become embedded in the machinery of government, they will be exceedingly difficult to dismantle.

That is how bureaucracy without bureaucrats becomes authoritarianism without accountability.

The government may employ fewer people, but if it can watch more people, investigate more people, process more people, target more people and exercise more power over more lives than ever before, that is not smaller government.

It is government without human limits.

Once we remove the human beings who can question, resist, object and refuse, we may discover too late that we have not eliminated the bureaucracy at all.

We have eliminated the brakes.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

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