WASHINGTON, May 9 — The federal human resources agency at the heart of billionaire Elon Musk's efforts to slash the federal workforce is poised to roll out software to speed layoffs across the United States (US) government, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The software could turbo-charge the rapid-fire effort to downsize the government at a time when several larger federal agencies are preparing to execute plans for mass layoffs of tens of thousands of workers.
According to a Reuters tally, some 260,000 government workers have already accepted buyouts, early retirement, or been laid off since Republican President Donald Trump returned to the presidency in January. The process has been far from smooth. Some workers were mistakenly fired and had to be rehired.
The software is an updated version of a decades-old Pentagon programme, AutoRIF, that has been little used in recent years.
Four sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that under direction from Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), software developers at the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) have created a more user-friendly web-based version over the past few months that provides targets for layoffs much more quickly than the current labor-intensive manual process.
The program is poised to be rolled out to the agencies by OPM just as Musk steps back from DOGE, which has driven the downsizing effort, to focus more on Tesla and his other companies.
AutoRIF's name comes from "Reduction in Force," a term used to describe mass layoffs. Three sources said the revamped version has been given the more benign-sounding name "Workforce Reshaping Tool. "
With the software revamp now complete, OPM will lead demonstrations and user testing and add new users in the coming weeks, one of the sources said.
DOGE, OPM, the White House, the Pentagon, and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Wired magazine was the first to report on the revamp effort. But Reuters is reporting for the first time on its completion, the capabilities of the new program, rollout plans, and its new name.
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United States President Donald Trump signs an executive order at the White House in Washington DC, the United States, on April 8, 2025. — Picture by REUTERS[/caption]
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Trump established DOGE to modernise government software, cut spending and drastically reduce the size of the federal workforce, which he complains is bloated and wasteful.
DOGE has said it has saved more than US$160 billion (RM684.6 billion) through cuts to federal contracts and staff. Still, it has given few details publicly about what it is doing to modernise technology to make the government more efficient.
The update of the Pentagon software, which DOGE has not publicly confirmed, is the only known example of that effort bearing fruit.
Three sources told Reuters that, currently, most federal RIFs are done manually, with HR employees poring over spreadsheets containing data on employee seniority, veteran status, and performance.
The new software is being rolled out just as larger agencies such as the Department of Veterans Affairs are set to move forward with plans to eliminate some 80,000 jobs. According to news reports, the Internal Revenue Service wants to slash its payrolls by 40 per cent.
The tool will allow agencies "to remove a massive number of federal employees from their positions," if it works, said the University of Minnesota's associate professor of law Nick Bednar, who has been tracking the government layoffs.
"What DOGE has started is going to continue without Elon Musk," he said.
AutoRIF was developed by the Pentagon over a quarter of a century ago. It pulled data from its HR system, sifted through firing rules quickly and produced names of employees eligible to be laid off.
However, it was difficult to migrate it to other agencies, whose workers had to manually input data on potential candidates for dismissal, a cumbersome process subject to errors.
The programme, described as "clunky" by a 2020 Pentagon HR newsletter, would also allow only one employee to work on an RIF, two sources said.
Three sources said the upgrade makes it web-based, easing employee access to the tool while enabling multiple people to work on a mass layoff. It also allows for the upload of employee data for analysis, freeing HR workers from manually inputting personal records of possible targets for dismissal manually.
While speed is a clear advantage, the software could pose other challenges, according to the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy professor Don Moynihan.
"If you automate bad assumptions into a process, then the scale of the error becomes far greater than an individual could undertake,
"It will not necessarily help them to make better decisions, and it will not make those decisions more popular," he said.
Trump's drive to downsize and reshape the government has already led to the gutting of entire agencies, like the US Agency for International Development, as well as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which seeks to protect Americans from financial abuses.
The government overhaul has led to numerous lawsuits seeking to block the Trump administration from proceeding with some of the planned dismissals.
— Reuters
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Elon Musk walks on Capitol Hill in Washington, US, on December 5, 2024. — Picture by REUTERS[/caption]
