DOGE Used AI for Housing Policy. The Government Won’t Say How

Members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) who were working at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) used artificial intelligence to inform policy decisions. Now, the agency appears to be denying Freedom of Information Act requests for information on the development and use of AI tools, and the way they informed policy decisions, according to documents obtained by a FOIA request by Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal organization.

Last year, WIRED reported that Christopher Sweet, who was then a third-year student at the University of Chicago, had joined the DOGE team at HUD, along with Scott Langmack, who came to DOGE from a property technology startup called Kukun. Sweet’s primary focus, according to HUD employees who spoke to WIRED at the time, was on using artificial intelligence to identify agency rules for potential rescission, or contract cancellations, as part of a similar effort across the government.