DOGE Built An AI To Delete Half Of Federal Regulations. Will It Work?
By James Broughel, Forbes, July 28, 2025
The Washington Post recently revealed that the Department of Government Efficiency, known by its acronym DOGE, is developing and deploying an artificial intelligence tool designed to eliminate as much as half of all federal regulations. According to internal government documents obtained by the Post, the “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool” has already flagged approximately 100,000 federal rules that are not required by law. The hope is that AI can also be used to automate the most labor-intensive parts of the regulatory repeal process, so that a major deregulatory effort will be underway by the first anniversary of President Trump’s second term in office.
The internal documents reviewed by the Post include a PowerPoint presentation dated July 1, 2025, which lays out the assumptions and expectations driving the initiative. That document proposes that roughly 50 percent of the Code of Federal Regulations, or around 100,000 individual rule sections, could be repealed without violating any statutory obligations.
DOGE estimates that the total cost of regulatory compliance in the United States is around $3.1 trillion annually. Stripping out rules that are not legally required could generate up to $1.5 trillion in annual compliance savings. Additionally, deregulation could unlock $600 billion in new investment and $1.1 trillion in new government revenue, according to DOGE. These are headline-grabbing numbers, though the methodology behind them isn’t fully clear from the presentation.
