By Alexandra Alper
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -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 U.S. 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 a number of larger federal agencies are preparing to execute plans for mass layoffs of tens of thousands of workers.
Some 260,000 government workers already have accepted buyouts, early retirement or been laid off since Republican President Donald Trump returned to the presidency in January, according to a Reuters tally. 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 program, known as AutoRIF, that had been little used in recent years.
Under direction from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), software developers at the U.S. 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, four sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
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. The revamped version has been given the more benign-sounding name “Workforce Reshaping Tool,” three sources said.
With the software revamp now complete, OPM will lead demonstrations, user testing and start adding new users in the coming weeks, one of the sources said.
DOGE, OPM, the White House, Pentagon and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Wired magazine was first to report on the revamp effort. But Reuters is reporting for the first time on the completion of that revamp, the capabilities of the new program, rollout plans and its new name.
JOB-CUTTING SCYTHE
Trump established DOGE to modernize 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 $160 billion through cuts to federal contracts and staff, but it has given few details publicly about what it is doing to modernize 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.
Currently, most federal RIFs are done manually – with HR employees poring over spreadsheets containing data on employee seniority, veteran status and performance, three sources told Reuters.
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. The Internal Revenue Service has said it wants to slash its payrolls by 40%, according to media reports.
The tool will allow agencies “to remove a massive number of federal employees from their positions,” if it works, said Nick Bednar, an associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota who has been tracking the government layoffs.
“What DOGE has started is going to continue without Elon Musk,” Bednar said.
AutoRIF was developed by the Pentagon more than a quarter century ago. It pulled data from its HR system, sifted through firing rules quickly and produced names of employees eligible to be laid off.
But it was difficult to migrate it to other agencies, whose workers had to manually input data on potential candidates for dismissal, a cumbersome process that is subject to errors. The program, described as “clunky” by a 2020 Pentagon HR newsletter, also would allow only one employee to work on a RIF, two sources said.
The upgrade makes it web-based, easing employee access to the tool while enabling multiple people to work on a mass layoff, three sources said. It also allows for the upload of employee data for analysis, freeing HR workers from having to manually input personal records of possible targets for dismissal.
While speed is a clear advantage, the software could pose other challenges, according to Don Moynihan, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy.
“If you automate bad assumptions into a process, then the scale of the error becomes far greater than an individual could undertake,” Moynihan said.
“It won’t necessarily help them to make better decisions and it won’t make those decisions more popular,” Moynihan added.
Trump’s drive to downsize and reshape the government already has led to the gutting of entire agencies such as the U.S. 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 that seek to block the Trump administration from moving forward with some of the planned dismissals.
(Reporting by Alexandra Alper; Additional Reporting by Raphael Satter and Tim Reid; Editing by Ross Colvin and Will Dunham)
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