If Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts haven’t impacted your agency yet, they are about to. Across the government, civilian agencies are being asked to cut costs and downsize their teams without sacrificing output.
This is more than just a tightening of the belt. It’s a call to find more efficient and effective ways of working throughout your agency. The result is sweeping budget cuts, buyouts, layoffs, and downsizing.
In order to counteract these cuts, the administration is asking agencies to increase their use of artificial intelligence (AI) and is removing barriers to AI innovation so its capabilities can be used in greater capacity in the future.
How AI can help civilian agencies do more with less.
The government runs on unstructured data. Policy documents, audits, reports, emails, public comments, legal filings, social media, and news all inform the missions of agencies. In fact, it’s estimated that 80%-90% of all enterprise data is unstructured data. With so much fragmented data spread across millions of documents, the information is difficult for analysts to search and impossible to manually track at scale.
Before the DOGE cuts, the process of analyzing this information was cumbersome, overwhelming and incomplete. It might take weeks and months to glean relevant insights from public documents, at which point opportunities may have been missed or no longer relevant. Now, as cuts go into place, that job has become all but impossible to complete using traditional means.
AI-driven natural language processing (NLP) automates the analysis of all this unstructured text, instantly turning it into structured, searchable insights. AI-powered NLP surfaces key information from massive text databases, identifying trends and organizing data by theme in real-time. In short, it enables your post-DOGE team to perform more efficiently, effectively, and error-free than before.
If agencies are looking for someplace to start with their adoption of AI, NLP delivers the biggest bang for the buck—taking a valuable, yet overwhelming mission and drastically simplifying it in a time of shrinking budgets and staff.
What agencies can accomplish with AI and NLP.
Using current AI technology, agencies can use AI and NLP in a number of different ways, supporting DOGE mandates and easing the burden of budget cuts for your teams. It should be noted that today’s AI is not just faster than human analysis, it’s also more accurate.
Here are three ways NLP can help agencies do more with less:
- Decision Support. In everyday matters—and especially in a crisis—gaining quick insights into the matters of the day is essential to making the right decisions and framing the right responses. AI extracts relevant data from internal and external reports to support evidence-based logistics, staffing, prioritization, and policymaking. NLP can use contextualized decision support—grounded in verifiable, sourced information, reducing uncertainty and increasing decision accuracy and confidence.
- Public Sentiment & Media Monitoring. Whether gauging public sentiment to shape policy decisions or combating malign influence campaigns in social media, time is of the essence. NLP tracks real-time media coverage and public sentiment, helping agencies stay ahead of looming crises.
- Regulatory Oversight & Risk Detection. Remaining compliant is one of the many ways agencies can preserve budget. AI can continuously scan audit reports, regulatory filings, and legal documents to identify compliance risks faster and avoid penalties.
In homeland security, AI plays a critical role in identifying threats, supporting emergency response, mitigating national security risks, and strengthening border protection. Specifically for border operations, AI-powered natural language processing (NLP) can help agents detect smuggling trends, assess transnational crime patterns, monitor travel flows, and surface real-time intelligence from both internal and open-source data. In disaster relief, AI helps coordinate and optimize relief efforts. It can analyze financial transactions to detect fraud, improve program integrity and fraud detection in healthcare delivery, optimize public transportation routes, assist in disease detection and treatment planning, drive intelligence analysis, analyze crime data, and support tax compliance. Across every agency in government, AI has the power to increase mission impact while aligning with the DOGE mandates.
The sooner you adopt, the better position you’ll be in.
The administration’s expansion in the use and development of AI are the two greatest trends in AI for civilian agencies for 2025 and beyond. Agencies that embrace AI today will be better prepared to navigate upcoming resource constraints, emerging more efficient, well-informed, and ready to fulfill their missions despite tightening budgets and personnel reductions.
Using AI is not merely a way to satisfy expectations. It supports efficiency, delivers real-time results, reduces operational costs, increases agility and ensures decisions are based on real-time data and not outdated reports. Early adoption will position your agency as a leader and innovator, currying favor among the lawmakers who have identified AI as the only feasible way forward to counteract budget and resource reductions.
With less manpower and shrinking budgets, AI is no longer optional—it’s a necessity. It’s key to not just surviving DOGE, but thriving through it. The administration’s AI push make it the perfect time to adopt. Moreover, adopting now will create less of a hardship when and if further cuts or modifications to the way your agency works happen in the future.
Primer is a leading provider of AI for NLP and has emerged as the most error-free solution in the marketplace, delivering 99.7% accuracy. To learn more about how we can help you meet your AI and DOGE mandates, contact us or request a demo.
