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Credit to Author: Will Knight, Paresh Dave, Leah Feiger| Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2025 20:19:27 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Sweeping layoffs architected<\/span> by the Trump administration and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency<\/a> may be coming as soon as this week at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a nonregulatory agency responsible for establishing benchmarks that ensure everything from beauty products<\/a> to quantum computers<\/a> are safe and reliable.<\/p>\n According to several current and former employees at NIST, the agency has been bracing for cuts since President Donald Trump took office last month and ordered billionaire Elon Musk and DOGE to slash spending across the federal government. The fears were heightened last week when some NIST workers witnessed a handful of people they believed to be associated with DOGE inside Building 225, which houses the NIST Information Technology Laboratory at the agency\u2019s Gaithersburg, Maryland, campus, according to multiple people briefed on the sightings. The DOGE staff were seeking access to NIST\u2019s IT systems, one of the people said.<\/p>\n Soon after the purported visit, NIST leadership told employees that DOGE staffers were not currently on campus, but that office space and technology were being provisioned for them, according to the same people.<\/p>\n On Wednesday, Axios<\/a> and Bloomberg<\/a> reported that NIST had begun informing some employees that they could soon be laid off. About 500 recent hires who are still in probationary status and can be let go more easily were among those expected to be affected, according to the reports. Three sources tell WIRED that the cuts likely impact lauded technical experts in leadership positions, including three lab directors who were promoted within the last year. One person familiar with the agency tells WIRED that the official layoff notices may come Friday.<\/p>\n The White House and a spokesperson for NIST, which is part of the Department of Commerce, did not yet return requests for comment.<\/p>\n One NIST team that has been fearing cuts because of its number of probationary employees is the US AI Safety Institute (AISI), which was created after former President Joe Biden\u2019s sweeping executive order on AI<\/a> issued in October 2023. Trump rescinded<\/a> the order shortly after taking office last month, describing it as a \u201cbarrier to American leadership in artificial intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n The AI Safety Institute and its roughly two dozen staffers have been working closely with AI companies, including rivals to Musk\u2019s startup xAI like OpenAI and Anthropic, to understand and test the capabilities of their most powerful models. Musk was an early investor in OpenAI and is currently suing the startup over its decision to transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit corporation.<\/p>\n AISI\u2019s inaugural director, Elizabeth Kelly, announced<\/a> she was leaving her role earlier this month. Several other high-profile NIST leaders working on AI have also departed in recent weeks, including Reva Schwartz, who led NIST\u2019s Assessing Risks and Impacts of AI program, and Elham Tabassi, NIST\u2019s chief AI adviser. Kelly and Schwartz declined to comment. Tabassi did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n US vice president JD Vance recently signaled the new administration\u2019s intent to deprioritize AI safety at the AI Action Summit, a major international meeting held in Paris last week that AISI and other government staffers were not invited<\/a> to attend, according to three familiar with the matter. \u201cI'm not here this morning to talk about AI safety,\u201d Vance said in his first major speech as VP. \u201cI'm here to talk about AI opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n Though they receive bipartisan support, the AI Safety Institute and other parts of NIST had been preparing for the Trump administration to set new priorities for their work. In anticipation, some NIST teams began moving to deprioritize efforts such as fighting misinformation and racial bias in AI systems, according to two people familiar with the projects. Two other people say that putting even more public emphasis on national security was welcomed among some staffers, since the institute has already engaged in related research efforts.<\/p>\n Overall, the AI Safety Institute has been pressing ahead with working groups and other efforts focused on developing guidelines for studying AI systems. Last week, the startup Scale AI announced<\/a> it had been selected by the institute as its \u201cfirst approved third-party evaluator authorized to conduct AI model assessments.\u201d Michael Kratsios, Trump\u2019s pick to direct the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, was until recently Scale\u2019s managing director.<\/p>\n The feared layoffs at NIST have drawn strong rebuke from civil society groups, such as the Center for AI Policy, and congressional Democrats. NIST\u2019s 2024 budget was about $1.5 billion<\/a>, approximately .02 percent of federal spending overall, making it perhaps an unlikely target for Musk\u2019s DOGE project. DOGE staffers have dropped into several government agencies<\/a> this month, gaining access<\/a> to sensitive systems, promoting the use of AI<\/a> to boost productivity, and seeding a trail of resignations among longtime government workers. DOGE\u2019s specific goals at NIST couldn\u2019t be immediately learned.<\/p>\n US representative Jake Auchincloss, a Democrat who serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, says any efforts by DOGE to trim NIST rather than focusing instead on parts of government that account for far more spending, such as Department of Defense contracts, amounts to \u201cscrounging for pennies in front of a bank vault.\u201d He called NIST an agency with high returns on investment and warned that hobbling it would be self-defeating for the US. \u201cImparing NIST\u2019s function is going to harm business productivity and increase costs,\u201d Auchincloss says.<\/p>\n Staff for Democrats<\/a> on the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology say they are concerned about the potential for significant economic harm from any cuts to NIST. The agency\u2019s timekeeping is used by stock markets, and its research on buildings and pipelines help keep infrastructure intact. DOGE \u201cmight throw out things that are crucial to the functioning of the economy,\u201d says one of the Democratic staffers, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity.<\/p>\n Budget cuts at other agencies could also have ripple effects at NIST, because they help fund some of its projects, including studies on the accuracy of face recognition systems and a database of cybersecurity vulnerabilities. \u201cWe\u2019re worried about staffing, funding at every research agency in the federal government,\u201d says the science committee staffer.<\/p>\n Earlier this month, California representative Zoe Lofgren, the top Democrat on the Republican-controlled House Science Committee, and her colleagues sent letters to the heads of several agencies, including NIST and NASA, demanding transparency about DOGE activities.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile NIST does not conduct classified research, its cutting edge work in topics such as AI, quantum sensors and clocks, and semiconductors are world-class, and improper exfiltration to non-secure servers would be a boon for our adversaries,\u201d stated the letter last week to NIST<\/a> acting director Craig Burkhardt. It demanded a response from him by February 18; as of February 19, there had been none, according to Lofgren\u2019s office.<\/p>\n The letter also raised concern about Musk\u2019s potential conflicts of interest at NIST, given the intimate dealings between the AI Safety Institute and his competitors. Representative Auchincloss, who has studied NIST\u2019s biology projects, expressed concern about Musk potentially gaining an unfair advantage and compromising safety by influencing standards that affect his Neuralink brain implant venture.<\/p>\n NIST was originally created in 1901 to help the US science and engineering industries establish scientific norms in areas like measurement. In coordination with the US Naval Observatory, the agency is also responsible for building and maintaining<\/a> the country\u2019s most accurate atomic clocks. Overall, NIST currently employs about 3,400<\/a> scientists, engineers, and technicians, according to its website.<\/p>\n