US transport department ‘to use AI to draft regulations’
The US Department of Transportation (DoT) plans to use artificial intelligence to draft federal transport regulations, with the objective of allowing staff to do their jobs “better and faster”.
DoT employees were first made aware of the plan in December last year, when it was presented as part of demonstrations showing AI’s potential to “revolutionise” the way the department drafts rulemakings, according to a message sent to colleagues by Daniel Cohen, the department’s assistant general counsel for regulation.
DoT regulations ensure safety across multiple modes of transportation, including aeroplane, freight train and road traffic control, as well as areas like gas pipeline maintenance. The agency’s plan is to use AI to reduce the time it takes to move from an idea to a complete draft regulation for review by the US Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The agency said the optimal timeframe for this process is 30 days.
According to notes from a meeting of agency leaders seen by ProPublica, Gregory Zerzan, the DoT’s general counsel, said president Donald Trump is “very excited about this initiative”, and that the DoT is the “point of the spear” and the “first agency that is fully enabled to use AI to draft rules”, suggesting its work could be replicated in other federal government departments in future.
Government Service Delivery will bring together global digital government leaders to explore how governments can use tech-driven innovation to deliver high-quality public services. The event will be held at Walter E Washington Convention Center, Washington DC on June 10 – 11, 2026. Find out more and register he
According to ProPublica article on Government Executive, two staffers who attended the demo session in December said the DoT planned to use its own version of Google Gemini to enable staff to generate proposed rules in a matter of minutes or seconds.
Ben Winters, the AI and privacy director at the non-profit Consumer Federation of America, hihglighted to ProPublica that the plan came in the wake of the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce last year, when he said expertise was lost.
DoT lost nearly 4,000 of its 57,000 employees and more than 100 attorneys after Trump returned to the White House, according to data from the US Office of Personnel Management.
Read more: US government launches Tech Force to bring in digital talent
GSA sets out stall for AI adoption in 2026
The DoT joins several agencies that have been encouraged to use AI in their work, for tasks such as translating documents, analysing data and sorting public comments.
Last month, the General Services Administration (GSA) said its goal for 2026 was to empower agencies to adopt AI, remove blockers to AI innovation, and spur related collaboration.
It said in a blog post that it had started testing chatbots that “provide simple answers to common enquiries” about federal programmes and was using AI to help draft market research summaries. It has also started testing what it called “built-in generative AI functions to increase employee productivity”.
The GSA also said it was working to remove blockers to AI adoption across government, particularly the authorisation process which it said was excessively slow and costly.
Actions taken to address this last year included alterations to a government-wide compliance initiative known as the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), which provides a standardised approach to security assessment and authorisation for cloud computing products and services.
This resulted in the launch of FedRAMP 20x, described by the federal government as “a new assessment and authorisation path”.
Read more: US state department looking to agentic AI to ‘take action’ for officials, CIO says
About Jack Aldane
Jack is a British journalist, cartoonist and podcaster. He graduated from Heythrop College London in 2009 with a BA in philosophy, before living and working in China for three years as a freelance reporter. After training in financial journalism at City University from 2013 to 2014, Jack worked at Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters before moving into editing magazines on global trade and development finance. Shortly after editing opinion writing for UnHerd, he joined the independent think tank ResPublica, where he led a media campaign to change the health and safety requirements around asbestos in UK public buildings. As host and producer of The Booking Club podcast – a conversation series featuring prominent authors and commentators at their favourite restaurants – Jack continues to engage today’s most distinguished thinkers on the biggest problems pertaining to ideology and power in the 21st century. He joined Global Government Forum as its Senior Staff Writer and Community Co-ordinator in 2021.
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