Musk staff propose bigger role for AI in Education Department

Allies of Elon Musk’s stationed within the Education Department are considering replacing some contract workers who interact with millions of students and parents annually with an artificial intelligence chatbot, according to internal department documents and communications.

The proposal is part of President Donald Trump’s broader effort to shrink the federal workforce and would mark a major change in how the agency interacts with the public. The Education Department’s biggest job is managing billions of dollars in student aid, and it routinely fields complex questions from borrowers.

The department currently uses call centers and a rudimentary AI bot to answer questions. The proposal would introduce generative AI, a more sophisticated version of AI that could replace many of those human agents.

The call centers employ 1,600 people who field more than 15,000 questions per day from student borrowers.

The vision could be a model for other federal agencies, in which humans are replaced by technology, and behemoth contracts with outside companies are shed or reduced in favor of more automated solutions. In some cases, that technology was developed by players from the private sector who are now working inside or with the Trump administration.

Musk has significant interest in AI. He founded a generative AI company and is also seeking to gain control of OpenAI, one of the biggest players in the industry. At other agencies, workers from the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Musk, have told federal employees that AI would be a significant part of the administration’s cost-cutting plans.

A year after the Education Department oversaw a disastrous rollout of a new federal student aid application, longtime department officials say they are open to the idea of seeking greater efficiencies, as have leaders in other federal agencies. Many are partnering with the efficiency initiative.

But Department of Education staff have also found that a 38% reduction in funding for call center operations could contribute to a “severe degradation” in services for “students, borrowers and schools,” according to one internal document obtained by The New York Times.

The Musk associates working inside the Education Department include former executives from education technology and venture capital firms. Over the past several years, those industries have invested heavily in creating AI education tools and marketing them to schools, educators and students.

The Musk team at the department has focused, in part, on a helpline that is operated on a contract basis by Accenture, a consulting firm, according to the documents reviewed by the Times. The call center assists students who have questions about applying for federal Pell grants and other forms of tuition aid, or about loan repayment.

The contract that includes this work has sent more than $700 million to Accenture since 2019 but is set to expire next week.

“The department is open to using tools and systems that would enhance the customer service, security and transparency of data for students and parents,” said Madi Biedermann, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for communications. “We are evaluating all contracts to assess effectiveness relative to costs.”

Accenture did not respond to interview requests. A September report from the Education Department describes 1,625 agents answering 462,000 calls in one month. The agents also handled 118,000 typed chats.

In addition to the helpline, Accenture provides a broad range of other services to the student aid system. One of those is Aidan, a more rudimentary virtual assistant that answers basic questions about student aid. It was launched in 2019, during Trump’s first term.

Accenture reported in 2021 that Aidan fielded 2.2 million messages in one year. But its capabilities fall far short of what Musk’s associates envision building using generative AI, according to the internal documents.

Trump and former President Joe Biden directed federal agencies to look for opportunities to use AI to better serve the public.

The proposal to revamp the communication system follows a meltdown in the rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, last year under Biden. As FAFSA problems caused mass confusion for students applying for financial aid, several major contractors, including Accenture, were criticized for breakdowns in the infrastructure available to students and parents seeking answers and help.

From January 2024 through May, roughly three-quarters of the 5.4 million calls to the department’s helplines went unanswered, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

More than 500 workers have since been added to the call centers, and wait times were significantly reduced, according to the September Department of Education report.

But transitioning into using generative AI for student aid help, as a replacement for some or all human call center workers, is likely to raise questions around privacy, accuracy and equal access to devices, according to technology experts.

Generative AI systems still sometimes share information that is false.

Given how quickly AI capabilities are advancing, those challenges are potentially surmountable, but they should be approached methodically, without rushing, said John Bailey, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former director of educational technology at the Education Department under President George W. Bush.

Bailey has since become an expert on the uses of AI in education.

“Any big modernization effort needs to be rolled out slowly for testing, to see what works and doesn’t work,” he said, pointing to the botched introduction of the new FAFSA form as a cautionary tale.

“We still have kids not in college because of that,” he said.

In recent weeks, the Education Department has absorbed a number of DOGE workers, according to two people familiar with the process, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the department’s security procedures and feared for their jobs.

One of the people involved in the DOGE efforts at the Education Department is Brooks Morgan, who until recently was CEO of Podium Education, a startup based in Austin, Texas, and has also worked for a venture capital firm focused on education technology, according to the two people.

Another new staffer working at the agency is Alexandra Beynon, the former head of engineering at Mindbloom, a company that sells ketamine, according to those sources and an internal document.

And a third is Adam Ramada, who formerly worked at a Miami venture capital firm, Spring Tide Capital, which invests in health technology, according to an affidavit in a lawsuit filed against DOGE.

None of those staffers responded to interview requests.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.