Algorithms quietly run the city of DC—and maybe your hometown

The most powerful government in the world is located in Washington, DC. There are 690,000 people and 29 obscure algorithms in it. The city uses automation to screen housing applicants, predict criminal recidivism, identify food assistance fraud, determine if a high schooler is likely to drop out, and many other things.

The snapshot of semiautomated urban life comes from a new report. The nonprofit spent 14 months investigating the city's use of algorithms and found they were used across 20 agencies. City agencies don't give full details of how their technology works. The team concluded that the city is using more than they could uncover.

The findings add to the evidence that many cities have quietly put bureaucratic algorithms to work across their departments where they can contribute to decisions that affect citizens' lives.

Government agencies often turn to automation in hopes of adding efficiency or objectivity to bureaucratic processes, but it's hard for citizens to know they are at work, and some systems have been found to discriminate and lead to decisions that ruin human lives. There were 40,000 false fraud allegations in Michigan due to the unemployment-fraud detection algorithm. Nearly half of federal agencies use some form of automated decision-making systems, according to a 2020 analysis.

In order to encourage people in other places to do the same things, EPIC dug into one city's use of algorithms to give a sense of the many ways they can influence citizens' lives. Ben Winters, who leads the nonprofit's work on artificial intelligence and human rights, said that Washington was chosen because half of the city's residents are black.