DOGE's 'AI-first' strategist is now the head of technology at the Department of Labor
The ex-Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd has quietly become the CIO of the labor department as mass layoffs and federal workforce automation continue.
Thomas Shedd, the 28 year-old ex-Tesla engineer and DOGE official installed as the head of the federal government’s Technology Transformation Services, has quietly—and perhaps illegally—become the Chief Information Officer at the Department of Labor, too. Shedd is the official who made waves for announcing that DOGE would be implementing an “AI-first strategy” across the government as it orchestrated the firing of tens of thousands of federal workers. Now he’s in charge of the US labor department’s technology.
“It’s probably illegal and it’s definitely terrible for both organizations,” a federal employee who works at one of them tells me.
The move has alarming implications. For one thing, it appears to violate federal law dictating the number of positions an official can hold. More concerningly, it puts Shedd in a position to influence how the government administers federal labor law—laws enshrined to protect workers from wage theft, discrimination and wrongful termination—at a time when his agency is eliminating jobs en masse. And, not to mention sometimes doing so mistakenly and illegally, while rolling out dubious workplace AI and automation programs.
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Many federal workers only found out about Shedd’s new role when it was reported by Natalie Alms at NextGov/FCW that the DOGE official had started showing up in the labor department offices. One reason those workers may have been surprised is that having dual paid roles in the government is, per provision 5 USC 5533, against the law. So, according to the Antideficiency Act, is having volunteers perform federal jobs. Exceptions can be made, per the law, if skilled personnel cannot “be readily obtained”—which is pretty clearly not the case here.
We don’t know if Shedd is getting paid two salaries, if he’s volunteering for the CIO role, or what—as usual, DOGE operations are some combination of haphazard, hapless, and obscured from public view. Either way, it constitutes a further consolidation of power of DOGE leadership in key parts of the federal government. This is, in other words, the sort of violation we’ve come to expect from DOGE. Of greater consequence is what Shedd might plan to do from his newfound perch as head of technology for the labor department.
"Having any member of Musk's cabal heading a top governmental posts is extremely alarming, since it constitutes a consolidation of the richest man on earth's power grab,” Eric Blanc, a professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, and author of We Are the Union and Labor Politics, tells me. “More specifically, Shedd's installation poses a direct threat to the ability of the Dept. of Labor to fulfill its mandate to protect legally mandated wage and safety standards for American workers.”
“My guess is that in the name of AI-driven ‘efficiency,’ Shedd will try to eliminate or radically undermine most of these pivotal regulatory functions,” Blanc adds.
The DoL, after all, administers and enforces 180 federal laws that protect, according to agency estimates, 165 million workers in 11 million workplaces. In addition to collecting vast data troves on workers under the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the department oversees wage laws, anti-discrimination laws, union laws, and workplace safety laws. It enforces laws protecting recipients of government contracts, grants, and financial aid. It enforces laws governing the distribution of pensions and welfare benefits—the latter two being of particular interest to DOGE, whose stated intent is to slash labor costs and eliminate contracts deemed to be connected to “DEI” principles.
“Particularly in a time of substantial layoffs, DoL is crucial to ensuring states can provide unemployment insurance to laid off workers, federal or otherwise,” the federal worker tells me. “Appointing a part time dilettante (remember, he's a mechanical engineer, not a software expert) is not the way to ensure the Department can play its crucial role. Not to mention that his record at the federal government so far doesn't show much empathy for workers or respect for their welfare, and DoL is responsible for enforcement of all sorts of life-and-death regulations protecting workers.”
“It does not bode well,” Veena Dubal, professor of law at UC Irvine, tells me. “In so much as he is in charge of data collection, dispersal, and analysis, I am concerned that his goals will not be to effectuate the congressionally defined purpose of the DoL.”
Federal workers, it’s safe to say, share that concern. They worry about the data Shedd and DOGE will suck up, the ways that DOGE leaders could impede labor investigations of companies close to Musk or Trump, and that all of this will make it harder for state agencies to determine benefits eligibility for workers.
“Dealing with fraud in unemployment has been a challenge for unemployment at least since COVID,” the federal worker tells me, “and the dumb-guy ‘efficient’ solution is just to make it harder to collect unemployment (see e.g. social security), but that will likely prevent or delay millions of eligible people from collecting benefits.”
Shedd and DOGE have already accelerated the development and deployment of GSAI, an AI chatbot that performs tasks previously carried out by federal workers. And we’ve discussed in depth Musk’s true interests in these “AI-first strategies” and automating government roles—concentrating power, eliminating accountability, and hollowing out state capacity. The AI-first program won’t work nearly as well as the human-staffed government it disrupted, if it works at all, but that won’t much matter. Those bent on arguing the government should be shrunk further will be able to point to any subsequent dysfunction as evidence that the cuts should continue.
Meanwhile, federal workers’ only real defenses against DOGE, Musk, and Trump’s campaign have been the court and unions. Now, with DOGE and Shedd embedded in the DoL, they stand to impact the administering of laws that might protect federal workers—and workers everywhere, for that matter.
“I think in the name of automating data, what will actually end up happening is that you cut out the enforcement piece,” Blanc tells me. “That's much easier to do in the process of moving to an AI-based system than it would be just to unilaterally declare these standards to be moot. Since the AI and algorithms are opaque, it gives huge leeway for bad actors to impose policy changes under the guide of supposedly neutral technological improvements.”
The ramifications here are both immediate—expect workforce reduction orders, chatbot automation, and comically slapdash readings of BLS labor statistics any day now—and more symbolic: A former Tesla engineer, Musk lackey, and AI aficionado is now in a leadership role at the labor department. A Silicon Valley acolyte with dull plans to put “AI first” is in the command center of the agency tasked with protecting the nation’s workers.
So while DOGE swings the wrecking ball on one front, promising more efficiency and government by AI, as human workers are laid off or left precarious by the constant threat, Shedd and Musk can now aim to limit those workers’ few options for recourse, streamlining the faulty concept of an automated government end-to-end. The era of government by Grok rattles on.
If no one gets the benefit, there is no fraud ::Roll Safe the Guy Tapping His Head Meme::
Fantastic reportage and analysis as usual.