Lawmakers and expert witnesses brainstormed applications for artificial intelligence to streamline overall government efficiency in a House-Senate Joint Economic Committee hearing on April 9, highlighting aims to harness the technology in the fight against fraud and waste in government programs.
“We need to keep working together across the aisle to save taxpayer dollars by reducing waste, fraud and abuse,” said Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., in her opening statement at the hearing. “There are many ways to do so by embracing new technologies and better data analytics, these types of tools can help an investigator identify potential fraud or a caseworker streamline an application process.”
Sterling Thomas, chief scientist at the Government Accountability Office (GAO), laid out three key actions that lawmakers could take to integrate AI into government efficiency: bolstering traditional anti-fraud tools, applying AI thoughtfully with quality data, and upskilling the Federal workforce.
“We know firsthand from their work that AI holds great promise furthering GAO’s mission and your goal of safeguarding taxpayer dollars,” said Thomas, who also emphasized the need for greater government innovation.
“Congress could establish a permanent analytics center of excellence to unlock tools that more efficiently identify and prevent fraud and proper payments,” he added.
Neil Chilson, former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), advocated for deploying innovative technology that could be used for anomaly detection and robotic process automation.
“The question before us is not whether AI can improve government efficiency, the evidence from the private sector is overwhelming that it can,” he said. “The question is whether we have the vision and the commitment to embrace these innovations.”
The greatest challenges preventing Federal deployment of AI technology to fight waste and fraud are the partitioning of data so that it can be used for large models and validating data, Thomas explained.
“[We] can’t get into a habit of marking something that is not fraud and making a guess at it,” said Thomas. “We do actually need to go through the entire process with the [inspector generals] to make sure that something has actually [been] validated [and] put … into kind of a gold standard data set that is going to produce the best outcome for our analytical tools.”
Thomas further warned that “rapid deployment without thoughtful design” could backfire, and encouraged the adoption of simple, rules-based tools when appropriate.