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Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency has torn through Washington at breakneck speed. During the first 100 days of President Donald Trumps second term, DOGE has played a central role in cutting more than 200,000 federal jobs. The organization has over that same time implemented aggressive cost-cutting measures (including to foreign food aid and medical research), overhauled longtime government cybersecurity systems, and targeted federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs for elimination. Most of these changes have been driven, in part, by AI toolsa move that has sparked serious concerns among experts. Critics say the rushed, untested use of artificial intelligence could lead to wrongful firings, mishandling of sensitive data, and lasting damage to core public services. It’s misguided for us to think that people who control technology and the associated power levers are naive about AI’s capabilities, says Julia Stoyanovich, director of the Center for Responsible AI at New York University. And their goal is not to do things better, or to make it so that everything is more efficient; rather, their goal is just to reduce the size of government, to reduce government spending, and to do this in a way that is just disorienting to everybody in society. Musk, who said earlier this month he would step back from DOGE to focus more on Tesla after the EV maker posted a dismal quarterly earnings report, has advocated for deploying AI to boost government efficiency. In practice, that has meant feeding sensitive Department of Education data into AI systems to identify programs for elimination; pushing to use AI to reassess benefits programs at the Department of Veterans Affairs; creating a chatbot for the U.S. General Services Administration to analyze contract data; and deploying AI toolsincluding Grok, the chatbot developed by xAI, which Musk ownsto monitor federal employee communications for critical sentiment toward Musk or Trump. According to one anonymous government official who spoke to The Washington Post in February, the end goal is something even more drastic: the replacement of the human workforce with machines. (Neither the White House nor DOGE responded to Fast Companys requests for comment.) To critics, such efforts represent a reckless and dangerous gamble. Experts warn that AI-driven government downsizing risks violating civil rights, mishandling some of the most sensitive personnel data in the country, and introducing hidden biases (even if accidentally) into critical decisions. As CNN reports, federal agencies, with their aging systems and complex missions, are ill-suited to abrupt automation, and without deep understanding of the underlying data, AI systems could misfirecutting essential staffers and services based on flawed outputs. David Evan Harris, a chancellors public scholar with the University of California, Berkeley, tells Fast Company theres also a massive alarm bell going off around the question of data protection and whether DOGE is safeguarding the information it is plugging into outsize AI systems supplied by companies like Anthropic and Musks xAI. It’s very unclear what kinds of security protocols the DOGE team is using, he says, and if they are taking any steps to make sure that private data of government employees and U.S. citizens, and even confidential data about U.S. government programs is not being turned into training data or retained improperly by any of these AI companies that they’re working with. Perhaps even more concerning, as Harvard researchers Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders argued in The Atlantic in February, replacing federal civil servants with AI could fundamentally weaken democratic governance by concentrating executive power. As they see it, with fewer human workers exercising independent judgment, future leaders could reshape government agencies at the push of a buttonsidestepping traditional checks and balances designed to prevent abuses of power. Still, there are signs the momentum around DOGE may be shifting. This month, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against DOGE, seeking records about the agencys use of AI across federal programs, citing concerns about mass surveillance and politically motivated misuse. Meanwhile, a group of Democratic lawmakers wrote a letter to Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, demanding more information on DOGE’s AI practices. And despite Musks sweeping promises, analyses suggest the agencys impact has been overstated: According to recent estimates published by The New York Times, DOGEs touted cost savings might not actually amount to much, given that all the agency-related firings, rehirings, and lost productivity will cost some $135 billion this fiscal year. Public sentiment appears to be souring as well: A recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that 57% of Americans disapprove of Musks efforts with DOGEa significant uptick over February, when 49% disapproved. These factors might force a reckoning for DOGE, but time is short. Once AI is entrenched in government operations, undoing the damage could be even harder than preventing it. The AI industry is famous right now for being locked in a race to the bottom and throwing caution to the wind so that they can launch products as fast as possible, says Harris. Combining that race to the bottom with DOGEs race to use AI for anything they can possibly think of is really concerning.
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E-Commerce
When the Vietnam War finally ended on April 30, 1975, it left behind a landscape scarred with environmental damage. Vast stretches of coastal mangroves, once housing rich stocks of fish and birds, lay in ruins. Forests that had boasted hundreds of species were reduced to dried-out fragments, overgrown with invasive grasses. The term ecocide had been coined in the late 1960s to describe the U.S. militarys use of herbicides like Agent Orange and incendiary weapons like napalm to battle guerrilla forces that used jungles and marshes for cover. Fifty years later, Vietnams degraded ecosystems and dioxin-contaminated soils and waters still reflect the long-term ecological consequences of the war. Efforts to restore these damaged landscapes and even to assess the long-term harm have been limited. As an environmental scientist and anthropologist who has worked in Vietnam since the 1990s, I find the neglect and slow recovery efforts deeply troubling. Although the war spurred new international treaties aimed at protecting the environment during wartime, these efforts failed to compel post-war restoration for Vietnam. Current conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East show these laws and treaties still arent effective. Agent Orange and daisy cutters The U.S. first sent ground troops to Vietnam in March 1965 to support South Vietnam against revolutionary forces and North Vietnamese troops, but the war had been going on for years before then. To fight an elusive enemy operating clandestinely at night and from hideouts deep in swamps and jungles, the U.S. military turned to environmental modification technologies. The most well-known of these was Operation Ranch Hand, which sprayed at least 19 million gallons of herbicides over approximately 6.4 million acres of South Vietnam. The chemicals fell on forests, and also on rivers, rice paddies, and villages, exposing civilians and troops. More than half of that spraying involved the dioxin-contaminated defoliant Agent Orange. Herbicides were used to strip the leaf cover from forests, increase visibility along transportation routes, and destroy crops suspected of supplying guerrilla forces. As news of the damage from these tactics made it back to the U.S., scientists raised concerns about the campaigns environmental impacts to President Lyndon Johnson, calling for a review of whether the U.S. was intentionally using chemical weapons. American military leaders position was that herbicides did not constitute chemical weapons under the Geneva Protocol, which the U.S. had yet to ratify. Scientific organizations also initiated studies within Vietnam during the war, finding widespread destruction of mangroves, economic losses of rubber and timber plantations, and harm to lakes and waterways. In 1969, evidence linked a chemical in Agent Orange, 2,4,5-T, to birth defects and stillbirths in mice because it contained TCDD, a particularly harmful dioxin. That led to a ban on domestic use and suspension of Agent Orange use by the military in April 1970, with the last mission flown in early 1971. Incendiary weapons and the clearing of forests also ravaged rich ecosystems in Vietnam. The U.S. Forest Service tested large-scale incineration of jungles by igniting barrels of fuel oil dropped from planes. Particularly feared by civilians was the use of napalm bombs, with more than 400,000 tons of the thickened petroleum used during the war. After these infernos, invasive grasses often took over in hardened, infertile soils. Rome Plows, massive bulldozers with an armor-fortified cutting blade, could clear 1,000 acres a day. Enormous concussive bombs, known as daisy cutters, flattened forests and set off shock waves killing everything within a 3,000-foot radius, down to earthworms in the soil. The U.S. also engaged in weather modification through Project Popeye, a secret program from 1967 to 1972 that seeded clouds with silver iodide to prolong the monsoon season in an attempt to cut the flow of fighters and supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam. Congress eventually passed a bipartisan resolution in 1973 urging an international treaty to prohibit the use of weather modification as a weapon of war. That treaty came into effect in 1978. The U.S. military contended that all these tactics were operationally successful as a trade of trees for American lives. Despite Congresss concerns, there was little scrutiny of the environmental impacts of U.S. military operations and technologies. Research sites were hard to access, and there was no regular environmental monitoring. Recovery efforts have been slow After the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese troops on April 30, 1975, the U.S. imposed a trade and economic embargo on all of Vietnam, leaving the country both war-damaged and cash-strapped. Vietnamese scientists told me they cobbled together small-scale studies. One found a dramatic drop in bird and mammal diversity in forests. In the A Li valley of central Vietnam, 80% of forests subjected to herbicides had not recovered by the early 1980s. Biologists found only 24 bird and five mammal species in those areas, far below normal in unsprayed forests. Only a handful of ecosystem restoration projects were attempted, hampered by shoestring budgets. The most notable began in 1978, when foresters began hand-replanting mangroves at the mouth of the Saigon River in Cn Gi forest, an area that had been completely denuded. In inland areas, widespread tree-planting programs in the late 1980s and 1990s finally took root, but they focused on planting exotic trees like acacia, which did not restore the original diversity of the natural forests. Chemical cleanup is still underway For years, the U.S. also denied responsibility for Agent Orange cleanup, despite the recognition of dioxin-associated illnesses among U.S. veterans and testing that revealed continuing dioxin exposure among potentially tens of thousands of Vietnamese. The first remediation agreement between the two countries only occurred in 2006, after persistent advocacy by veterans, scientists, and nongovernmental organizations led Congress to appropriate $3 million for the remediation of the Da Nang airport. That project, completed in 2018, treated 150,000 cubic meters of dioxin-laden soil at an eventual cost of over $115 million, paid mostly by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. The cleanup required lakes to be drained and contaminated soil, which had seeped more than 9 feet deeper than expected, to be piled and heated to break down the dioxin molecules. Another major hot spot is the heavily contaminated Bin Ho airbase, where local residents continue to ingest high levels of dioxin through fish, chicken, and ducks. Agent Orange barrels were stored at the base, which leaked large amounts of the toxin into soil and water, where it continues to accumulate in animal tissue as it moves up the food chain. Remediation began in 2019; however, further work is at risk with the Trump administrations near elimination of USAID, leaving it unclear if there will be any American experts in Vietnam in charge of administering this complex project. Laws to prevent future ecocide are complicated While Agent Oranges health effects have understandably drawn scrutiny, its long-term ecological consequences have not been well studied. Current-day scientists have far more options than those 50 years ago, including satellite imagery, which is being used in Ukraine to identify fires, flooding, and pollution. However, these tools cannot replace on-the-ground monitoring, which often is restricted or dangerous during wartime. The legal situation is similarly complex. In 1977, the Geneva Conventions governing conduct during wartime were revised to prohibit widespread, long term, and severe damage to the natural environment. A 1980 protocol restricted incendiary weapons. Yet oil fires set by Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991, and recent environmental damage in the Gaza Strip, Ukraine, and Syria indicate the limits of relying on treaties when there are no strong mechanisms to ensure compliance. An international campaign currently underway calls for an amendment to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to add ecocide as a fifth prosecutable crime alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression. Some countries have adopted their own ecocide laws. Vietnam was the first to legally state in its penal code that Ecocide, destroying the natural environment, whether committed in time of peace or war, constitutes a crime against humanity. Yet the law has resulted in no prosecutions, despite several large pollution cases. Both Russia and Ukraine also have ecocide laws, but these have not prevented harm or held anyone accountable for damage during the ongoing conflict. Lessons for the future The Vietnam War is a reminder that failure to address ecological consequences, both during war and after, will have long-term effects. What remains in short supply is the political will to ensure that these impacts are neither ignored nor repeated. Pamela McElwee is a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
The cutting edge of zipper technology involves zippers that work remotely. Japanese zipper maker YKK says it has developed a prototype for a self-propelled zipper that zips up with just the push of a button. These self-propelled zippers aren’t meant for your jeans or jackets, but rather for industrial uses, like tall tents that can’t be zipped up without using a ladder. Thats the mostly likely place you’ve seen YKK’s logo (it has 40% global market share). The company says the tech will save time and be safer than putting workers high up in the air to zip and unzip in hard-to-reach use cases. YKK conducted experiments with the zippers in February. It says that in one trial, the self-propelled zipper was able to zip up a 16-foot membrane in 40 seconds; in another, it zipped two arched shelter tents together in 50 seconds. The secret to the tech is a motorized screw that hooks the teeth of the zipper behind it as it moves forward. Video of the prototype shows the zipper and the button pushed to turn it on both connected to a cable, and the zipper itself is encased in a clear, transparent shell. YKK isn’t releasing the self-propelled zipper yet, but says it will continue to develop the prototype for practical use. If the company can get the tech off the ground, its wide adoption could push tents, temporary shelters, and partition dividers higher than they already go without any human-ladder limitations in the way.
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E-Commerce
Middle management can be exhaustingparticularly at the beginning of a managerial career. On the one hand, these employees have to get down into the weeds and help members of their team do their jobs in the most effective ways. They may have some inexperienced reports who need help and development to work effectively and independently. On the other hand, their daily work is governed by layers of leadership above that restrict their autonomy and require them to convince others that new things they would like to try are worth the effort. This combination creates a situation in which middle managers can feel locked in. They are constantly solving problems from their direct reports while determining how to carry out new orders from above. A heavy workload combined with a lack of autonomy can lead to burnout. If you oversee middle managers, here are some things you can do to help detect whether there is a problem and intervene quickly: Tap into your network One significant problem middle managers have is that they may lack a good peer group. Frontline employees often band together and create a social group that creates camaraderie at work and may also extend to lunch outings or happy hour gatherings. Middle managers (particularly when they first ascend into a supervisor role) often lose that social connection. With their promotion, they go from being one of the frontline staff to being one of them. Yet they may not be embraced immediately by other managers. So they not only struggle with the difficulties of the tasks they are given, but they may face that struggle alone. It’s important to create a good social network that middle managers can plug into. This gives them the benefit of a community to talk to, and members of that team can alert other leaders if they see a colleague struggling. Watch for defections When managers start to burn out, they lose resilience. Resilience enables people to maintain a calm and even disposition, even when things go wrong. It enables managers to work closely with team members who need more training or who have made a mistake. As emotional resilience breaks down, managers are more likely to react to mistakes and requests for assistance with anger and annoyance. They may be more likely to punish mistakes rather than use them as learning opportunities. These reactions are likely to create frustration among this managers direct reports. As a result, members of this supervisor’s team may look for other jobs, either by transferring elsewhere in the company or leaving altogether. Exit interviews with frontline employees can help to detect this problem by gathering information about why people are leaving. If a manager is burning out, it will be more effective to work with them to help reestablish their resilience rather than putting them on a punitive performance improvement plan that does not address the emotional component of the problem. Ask better questions When you meet with your direct reports, you might expect to get information from them that would help you to see whether they are exhibiting signs of burnout. Unfortunately, most leaders often ask generic questions like How are you doing? While some workplaces create enough psychological safety to allow employees to feel comfortable talking about fatigue with the job, most new managers will put on a brave face and say they are fine. To address this, it’s important to ask a few questions that require longer answers; these can provide you with insight into how your middle managers are handling the strain. One valuable approach is to ask your reports how they handled a particular situation, rather than how are they doing. This question gets your them to relive the situation in front of you, to describe what happened and how they addressed it. A lot of what youre listening for in this response is the emotion behind it. If you see anger or frustration on the part of your supervisee, that’s a signal that they are having difficulty with the stress of the job. If they talk about losing patience with particular employees, that may also be a warning sign. Use these conversations as a way to encourage middle managers you work with to talk with you when they are feeling overwhelmed. One of the best ways to help your team feel better about their work is for them to know that they are not dealing with stresses alone, and that you are available if they need help.
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E-Commerce
Since assuming office, the Trump administration has upended diversity, equity, and inclusion programs with startling efficiency. Over his first 100 days, President Donald Trump has taken a multipronged approach to derailing DEI initiatives across the federal government, academic institutions, and even the private sector. Through an array of executive actions, Trump has targeted federal anti-discrimination measures that date back 60 years and threatened to withhold funding from public schools and universities that maintain DEI programs. By explicitly directing federal agencies to investigate private employers, Trumps orders have also had a chilling effect across corporate Americaleading a number of companies to cut back on DEI initiatives or at least create the illusion of doing so. As each day seems to bring a new DEI-related action or court ruling, it’s clear that undoing the progress many employers and federal institutions have made on equity and inclusion continues to be a core priority for this government. Heres a closer look at how Trump has chipped away at DEI programs during just his first few months in office: The federal workforce Trump has moved swiftly to eliminate DEI programs that are squarely within his purviewnamely, reversing the equity requirements that President Joe Biden had put in place during his term. One of Trumps first edicts was an executive order that forced agencies to eliminate all illegal DEI efforts. The order explicitly noted that DEI offices would have to be disbanded and roles like chief diversity officer would have to be terminated. The Trump administration also told federal workers they were required to report anyone who tried to continue DEI work under a different nameor risk adverse consequences. Since Trump handed down this order in January, federal agencies have cut at least 428 DEI roles and put those workers on administrative leave, according to The New York Times. (That figure only includes data from the agencies that have publicly reported those job cuts.) Some federal workers who were affected by the cuts claimed their roles had little to do with DEI. Others have said that even their employee resource groups were affected as agencies cracked down on DEI to comply with the executive order. Through other executive actions, Trump reiterated the importance of merit-based hiring across the federal government, and that it should not be based on impermissible factors, such as ones commitment to illegal racial discrimination under the guise of equity, or ones commitment to the invented concept of gender identity over sex. By rescinding an executive order that dates back to 1965, Trump also took aim at a key policy that has been critical to promoting racial equity and curtailing discriminatory hiring practices among federal contractors. For decades, this order has forced the hand of companies that do business with the federal government, compelling them to adopt affirmative action plans that diversified the workforce. With Trumps action, some of the largest employers in the country are no longer subject to those requirements. The education system In recent weeks, Trump has ramped up pressure on the education system, fixing his sights on some of the most elite universities in the country. The administration is currently in the midst of a very public fight with Harvard University, stripping the school of billions of dollars in federal funding, in part because of its refusal to amend its DEI policies and admissions practices. (A number of other universities have also been singled out by Trump over DEI-related issues and face similar threats to their funding.) Last week, Trump pushed through an executive action aimed at college accreditors, who he argues have helped impose DEI requirements on universities. Trumps actions have already pushed many colleges to revise their DEI programs, regardless of whether they have been explicitly targeted: A recent Politico analysis found that more than 30 public universities have either closed their DEI offices or restructured them over the past few yearsincluding the University of Michigan, which was once known for its robust DEI program. While Trumps ongoing battle with higher education has garnered more attention, other academic institutions have not escaped scrutiny over their DEI efforts. In a memo earlier this month, the Trump administration ordered all public schools to eliminate DEI programs, again threatening to rescind federal funding. For now, this directive has been blocked by federal judgesand a coalition of attorneys general in Democratic states have brought a lawsuit against the Trump administration. Since taking office, Trump has also mounted investigations into the public school systems in California, Colorado, and Maine over DEI-related concerns like gender-neutral bathrooms and the rights of transgender students. The private sector Beyond the executive order targeting federal contractors, the Trump administration has attempted to exert its influence over the private sector in other ways. In the same action, Trump clearly directed federal agencies to investigate private-sector companies over any DEI programs that constitute illegal discrimination or preferences. This edict has sparked fear and confusion among corporate leaders, with many executives reportedly losing sleep over the threat of federal investigations. Experts say that a major source of concern has been the lack of clarity around what might be considered illegal DEI. Trumps orders have accelerated a shift in corporate America that had already been underway for some time. In the years since the racial reckoning of 2020, many companies have quietly backed away from the DEI initiatives they had seemingly embraced at the time. Since the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in 2023, however, employers have taken more drastic action in response to conservative activists like Robby Starbuck, who has waged social media campaigns to pressure companies into cutting their DEI program. Companies like Walmart and McDonalds have eliminated certain DEI policies and pulled out of the Human Rights Commissions Corporate Equality Index, an annual benchmarking survey that measures workplace inclusion for LGBTQ+ workers and is often touted by employers. Even tech giants like Meta and Google have made notable changes to representation goals, which had become common practice across the industry. Some DEI experts argue that not all of these changes should be seen as a full-throated rebuke of diversity work. In some cases, employers are merely folding DEI work into other teams or tweaking programs to ensure they are legally soundnot to mention evaluating whether they continue to be effective. If you see that theres no longer a DEI title at this company, I think that could be bad news, Joelle Emerson, the cofounder and CEO of culture and inclusion platform Paradigm, previously told Fast Company. Or it could be that the company is actually very strategically embedding some of this expertise in ways that are going to have more impact on the business. In fact, a survey recently conducted by Paradigm found that only a fraction of companies19%had actually reduced funding for DEI programs. Still, plenty of companies are now operating from a place of fear, carefully calibrating their external messaging on DEI and in some cases overcorrecting to avoid litigation or excessive scrutiny from Trump. The administrations anti-DEI agenda also seems to be shaping the Equal Employment Opportunity Commissions priorities under new acting chair Andrea Lucas, who has issued guidance on what the agency considers unlawful DEI-related discrimination. In March, Lucas made a controversial decision to send letters to 20 prominent law firms requesting details on their DEI-related practicesfour of which have already reached settlement agreements with the EEOC and agreed to drop the term DEI.
Category:
E-Commerce
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