OPINION
David Randall | Minding the Campus
I’ve been receiving a whole bunch of stalling answers to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to colleges and universities. We are overwhelmed with requests. It will take us another three months to ignore your query. If by any chance we were to answer your query, we would charge a dollar a page for peripheral documents, while we continue to hide the paydirt revelations about our skullduggery. (Said skullduggery about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) or other such violations of law and decency). Wouldn’t it be nice—I thought to myself—if we had an artificial intelligence (AI) agent installed at the university FOIA offices, so the colleges and universities could respond to my FOIA queries at once?
This is the latest variant of the technological temptation—the hope that we can solve some deep-rooted human problem, political or otherwise, by resort to some new technology. We can solve bureaucratic sabotage by installing the latest widget. We don’t need to do the hard work of politics; we can subscribe to the latest AI subscription service, Boffo Bureaucrats, and all will be well.
This dream isn’t entirely delusive. Consider the related issue of eliminating fraud in government or other programs. Megan McArdle intelligently makes the point that it can, on the margin, cost more to detect and combat fraud than you gain from deterring it—that the fiscally maximizing optimum level of fraud enforcement will leave some fraud. But our new computer technologies do lower the cost of detecting fraud. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) used computer technology, including AI, to identify fraud, with significant if not perfect success. The Department of Health and Human Services has announced plans to use AI to detect fraud. Technology may not eliminate fraud, but it might move the fiscally optimal enforcement level closer to zero.
Of course, AI can also be used to commit fraud. Perhaps fraud will just continue as it always has, but with both cops and crooks sending a tithe to the tech companies. With any bad luck, if government AI procurement is as slow as might be expected, fraud will get worse.
And the AI bureaucrat who answers FOIA requests?—An AI can be programmed to avoid being responsive. Maybe next year the AI will decide on its own that I don’t deserve to see the documents. It would be wonderful to deprive colleges and universities of their old excuses for being unhelpful, but education bureaucrats are likely bright enough to figure out how to game a new, AI-centered system.
But if we were to work for such a reform, I would have the AI be housed by, and responsible to, the state Attorney General. University administrators cannot be expected to run an AI in a helpful manner; a state attorney general’s office, on balance, is more likely to answer FOIA requests forthrightly. Indeed, all FOIA requests to state governments could be housed in the state Attorney General’s office. An Attorney General can stonewall too, of course—but at least there would be one responsible individual, whom voters could hold accountable for all FOIA-request failures.
Then, too, even more ambitiously, I would see whether AI could replace large numbers of higher-education administrators. AI poses a grave danger to education, by the nightmare already becoming reality of allowing students to stop studying and teachers to stop teaching. But the silver lining is that AI could replace all the useless and/or dictatorial bureaucrats infesting the university. If human bureaucrats won’t do the job, then it would be pleasant to turf ‘em out of a job.
Even if the AI were as useless and dictatorial as the bureaucrats it replaced, it would be cheaper. And that would be a plus for the country.
Having AI bureaucrats may be a terrible idea in principle. We may still need a Butlerian Jihad to eliminate AI from the world. But it’s worth thinking about how we can use AI in bureaucracy, especially the education bureaucracy, to reduce fraud, inefficiency, and culpable noncompliance with the law.
It is such a tempting dream—to get a response to my FOIA requests before I die.
This article was originally published on June 9, 2026 by Minding the Campus.
