Treating this as a problem to solve seems like an odd reaction. The public being able to better represent themselves, by making previously difficult content or access paths easier to navigate is a win for the public and therefore a win for the people. Of course, the government may prefer that the public not be able to speak up for itself. This is healthy tension. Honestly, the average person in the public is currently underserved relative to paid lobbyists, resourced activists, lawyers, etc. that know how to engage with the political system in more productive ways.
Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services
71–80 of 92 posts
Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services
#72I think this is probably a good thing. It’s not just public services, but any company that consumers have to deal with (in ways they don’t want to). Historically, only those with the most time, money, connections, and education have been able to extract benefits from these systems. E.g., if someone wants to fight an insurance claim being denied, they might need to hire an expensive lawyer or spend hours performing th…
> What I’m particularly curious about is what the “endgame” of this looks like. A higher fraction of money going into the system is lost to navigating adversarial processes. And probably the occasional person getting in legal trouble for not validating their LLM output before feeding it to a formal process. For customer-funded things (eg home insurance), this means higher prices for the same in-practice benefits (as…
It can also be a way for the public to force the government to perform better, thus lowering the cost of services. For example, the school district in my city is going through a financial crisis of its own making. The public is the only thing holding the district and board of the district accountable, to prevent them from wasting money and creating legal liabilities. AI has been instrumental in allowing the public to better understand the technical financial documents and situations the district is in.
Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Having older parents and watching what my grandparents went thru long before LLMs I just don't worry about the poor old state that much. You should worry more about your parents whose benefits are jeopardized by stress to the benefits system.
Is there any evidence that this is actually a real worry? Don’t audits usually find that vast majority of benefits are valid and correctly applied?
Stress to the benefits system != fraud
Stressing the benefits system includes improper payments, fraud, and even the perception of fraud or anything else that decreases political support. It also includes the effective denial of service that this paper documents.
It should not be controversial to expect high integrity for a system that pays out money. “Its OK, its just a minimum of $186B in improper payments in 2025, not fraud” shows that it doesn’t have high integrity and that you don’t expect it to.
Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
>it drowns the receivers in bureaucracy Huh, the receivers in this case are the bureaucracy. The senders are the one that has to navigate said bureaucracy. So, the entire thing is a wash. The systems are complex and confusing, many of them likely by design. Getting an appointment in some of them can take months. Knowing what you actually need can be daunting as quite often there is a byzantine set of requirements tha…
>the receivers in this case are the bureaucracy As someone that has worked in a bureaucracy, yes, bureaucrats are themselves victims of bureaucracy. One could even say the primary victims, if you’re going by total exposure time.
Which is why they get paid, of course. I feel more sympathy to the recipients ts who are eligible for benefits but unable to receive them due to onerous paperwork. AI is an equalizer between the desperate amateur and the bureaucratic professionals who know how to effectively navigate their side of the system.
For example, I just hooked an agent up to call my internet company to negotiate a discount. Without that capability, I am either financially taxed by paying too much, or cognitively and time taxed by having to do it myself.
Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services
#75In my view there are three takeaways from this, all of which are correct: 1. Already strained government services need to bear increasing input, affecting waiting times and employee workloads, which is bad. 2. LLMs are empowering citizens to appeal in a social security landscape which often require expert-level knowledge to navigate, which is good. 3.This phenomenon says more about the complexity of our social securi…
> hopefully prompting our governments to review and start thinking about social security reform
I see the opposite, where LLMs and purchased datasets will make it easier for governments to create additional barriers for taxpayers seeking welfare.
Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any evidence that this is actually a real worry? Don’t audits usually find that vast majority of benefits are valid and correctly applied?
Stress to the benefits system != fraud Stressing the benefits system includes improper payments, fraud, and even the perception of fraud or anything else that decreases political support. It also includes the effective denial of service that this paper documents. It should not be controversial to expect high integrity for a system that pays out money. “Its OK, its just a minimum of $186B in improper payments in 2025,…
I think we might be using the term "stress" in different ways.
This paper makes a distinction between direct operational strain and harm created by governments' responses (like adding fees, procedural barriers, and other types of friction in the system). The second part is where my concern is, when bureaucracy is meant to suppress questionable claims it can also delay or deter legitimate benefits.
The paper says it doesn't/can't make definitive claims about AI's impact, but says the strain is moderate. The conclusion does not seem to suggest any severe operational risk to these agencies/systems. Only 9 of 84 potential cases involved benefits or social protection, and it says most cases are good-faith users.
So, I do question what in the paper would show that the burden is large enough to jeopardize benefits? The main finding seems to be that friction in the system may itself effectively deny legitimate access.
Response to your edit: the $186 billion is GAO's government-wide estimate across 64 different programs and not a fraud figure or addressing individual benefits. It contains administrative and document errors, indeterminate payments, and underpayments. And expecting integrity in a system doesn't prevent criticism in the form of asking whether added enforcement bureaucracies cause more harm to legitimate beneficiaries than it prevents in that system.
Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services
#77I began receiving public benefits around 2003. Some of those benefits were granted without any contribution from my side at all. Eventually, when we got into the Section 8 housing and other things, there was a lot of paperwork. The application required gathering together a lot of documentation for my ID, my finances, my household makeup. Initially, it was all manual and on paper, and gradually over those two decades, it moved to electronic online processes.
The case workers and bureaucrats who worked on my case always expressed a lot of relief and encouragement that I was filling out the paperwork well. Being that I could do a lot of things electronically, and use my printer effectively, and just that I already had that mindset where I could fill out lots of forms and collate paperwork from a lot of different sources: I had a distinct leg-up compared to other recipients of public benefits.
A lot of people who are poor, illiterate, ESL, and in stressful living situations are not able to keep up with that paperwork and the bureaucratic requirements, like at all, and that is generally a first-order filter for who's not going to receive the entitlements. However, in my experience, there are usually social workers and specialists available, who can assist in the process, and if someone is in actual need of those benefits, not much will stand in their way of obtaining them.
I have also seen a lot of fraud and waste from the provider side of things. However, I do not believe there is a lot of individual fraud. At least not large-scale stuff. Because it would be difficult to carry through with it. If people are writing up appeals with LLMs, they may already be on a razor's edge of denial. It is definitely a real thing that, if you don't need/deserve the benefits, you can legit get buried in paperwork and dropped into bureaucratic mazes of fool's errands and snipe hunts, and you'll never find the end.
So today, the workflow for entitlements and benefits has moved to a completely electronic, online one, and so anyone who can navigate websites and collate PDFs and fill out web forms, these are the people uniquely advantaged to make use of those benefits. It's great that an LLM can write a cogent appeal and a rationale now. I suppose that the government will find themselves summarizing those with LLMs as well. Good luck!
Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stress to the benefits system != fraud Stressing the benefits system includes improper payments, fraud, and even the perception of fraud or anything else that decreases political support. It also includes the effective denial of service that this paper documents. It should not be controversial to expect high integrity for a system that pays out money. “Its OK, its just a minimum of $186B in improper payments in 2025,…
I think we might be using the term "stress" in different ways. This paper makes a distinction between direct operational strain and harm created by governments' responses (like adding fees, procedural barriers, and other types of friction in the system). The second part is where my concern is, when bureaucracy is meant to suppress questionable claims it can also delay or deter legitimate benefits. The paper says it d…
$186B are overpayments. That stresses the system. It's $186B you cant pay out legitimately and draws the ire of tax payers.
Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services
#79Maybe this will result in a well-defined API for government.
If I really squint my eyes and dream I see a government with event-sourced, auditable and reproducible architecture.
Re: Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services
#80I think this is probably a good thing. It’s not just public services, but any company that consumers have to deal with (in ways they don’t want to). Historically, only those with the most time, money, connections, and education have been able to extract benefits from these systems. E.g., if someone wants to fight an insurance claim being denied, they might need to hire an expensive lawyer or spend hours performing th…
> What I’m particularly curious about is what the “endgame” of this looks like. A higher fraction of money going into the system is lost to navigating adversarial processes. And probably the occasional person getting in legal trouble for not validating their LLM output before feeding it to a formal process. For customer-funded things (eg home insurance), this means higher prices for the same in-practice benefits (as…
Oh boy, time to Put everyone's job loss, home loss, death, and herpes diagnosis on the blockchain. NFTs anyone? Prediction markets!??