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.
At the time, HUD staffers told WIRED that employees were being looped in to give feedback on regulations that were flagged by the AI for rescission. Other employees, however, described the effort as redundant.
Sweet graduated from the University of Chicago in June with a degree in economics; Langmack is now the executive director of deregulation AI at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), under the Executive Office of the President, according to his LinkedIn.
More than 100 documents that had been requested by Democracy Forward about HUD’s AI use for decisionmaking were withheld. Among the reasons HUD cited for not releasing documents were a nonexistent AI privilege and a privilege for presidential communications that is real but generally held to apply only to the president and their immediate advisers. Several of the withheld documents, whose names are shared in the FOIA but whose contents remain unknown, appear to indicate that the DOGE team at HUD was using AI tools to help make policy decisions.
Sweet, Langmack, HUD, OMB, and the White House did respond to requests for comment.
One document, labeled “GPT defined Econ Analysis approach 11 10 25.docx,” which belonged to Langmack, was exempted from FOIA because it was labeled as “deliberative AI input.” Another document, titled “RegulatoryAnalysisPrompt.pdf,” also belonging to Langmack, appears to indicate that the DOGE team was looking into creating prompts to conduct regulatory analysis. Several of the other documents that were withheld for being part of the deliberative process were labeled as some form of “regulatory analysis” for different HUD programs, though it is not clear if AI was used in their creation.
Tori Noble, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that the lack of transparency around how AI tools might be used in the creating or changing policy is particularly worrisome, because tools have been known to hallucinate, show bias, or just plain get things wrong. “It’s not necessarily the case that we’d always know how tools are being used,” she says. “So having access to the prompts is really the best way to be able to tell what officials are using these tools for and how harmful those uses might be.”
There are currently no laws in the US that require the government to disclose if AI has been used in the creation of rules, policies, or regulation.
“If AI is being used to assess policy as one of the tools in the toolkit, I think at this stage in the development and use of AI, it is good protocol to indicate that,” says Mark Fagan, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. “In part to try and build confidence in the use of AI in government.”
