DOGE Recruits College Student to Use AI for Rewriting Government Regulations

DOGE put a college student in charge of using AI to rewrite regulations

A young man with no government experience who has yet to even complete his undergraduate degree is working for Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and has been tasked with using artificial intelligence to rewrite the agency's rules and regulations. Christopher Sweet was introduced to HUD employees as being originally from San Francisco and, most recently, a third-year student at the University of Chicago, where he was studying economics and data science, in an email sent to staffers earlier this month. "I'd like to share with you that Chris Sweet has joined the HUD DOGE team with the title of special assistant, although a better title might be 'Al computer programming quant analyst,'" Scott Langmack, a DOGE staffer and chief operating officer of an AI real estate company, wrote in an email widely shared within the agency and reviewed by WIRED. "With family roots from Brazil, Chris speaks Portuguese fluently. Please join me in welcoming Chris to HUD!" Sweet's primary role appears to be leading an effort to leverage artificial intelligence to review HUD's regulations, compare them to the laws on which they are based, and identify areas where rules can be relaxed or removed altogether. (He has also been given read access to HUD's data repository on public housing, known as the Public and Indian Housing Information Center, and its enterprise income verification systems, according to sources within the agency.) Plans for the industrial-scale deregulation of the US government were laid out in detail in the Project 2025 policy document that the Trump administration has effectively used as a playbook during its first 100 days in power. The document, written by a who's who of far-right figures, many of whom now hold positions of power within the administration, pushes for deregulation in areas like the environment, food and drug enforcement, and diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. One area Sweet is focusing on is regulation related to the Office of Public and Indian Housing (PIH), according to sources who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press. Sweet -- who two sources have been told is the lead on the AI deregulation project for the entire administration -- has produced an Excel spreadsheet with around a thousand rows containing areas of policy where the AI tool has flagged that HUD may have "overreached" and suggesting replacement language. Staffers from PIH are, specifically, asked to review the AI's recommendations and justify their objections to those they don't agree with. "It all sounds crazy -- having AI recommend revisions to regulations," one HUD source says. "But I appreciated how much they're using real people to confirm and make changes." Once the PIH team completes the review, their recommendations will be submitted to the Office of the General Counsel for approval. One HUD source says they were told that the AI model being used for this project is "being refined by our work to be used across the government." To do this, the source says they were told in a meeting attended by Sweet and Jacob Altik, another known DOGE member who has worked as an attorney at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, that the model will crawl through the Code of Federal Regulations (eCFR). Another source told WIRED that Sweet has also been using the tool at other parts of HUD. WIRED reviewed a copy of the output of the AI's review of one HUD department, which features columns displaying text that the AI model found to be needing an adjustment while also including suggestions from the AI for alterations to be made, essentially proposing rewrites. The spreadsheet details how many words can be eliminated from individual regulations and gives a percentage figure indicating how noncompliant the regulations are. It isn't clear how these percentages are calculated. Sweet did not respond to requests for comment regarding his work. In response to a request to clarify Sweet's role at HUD, a spokesperson for the agency said they do not comment on individual personnel. The University of Chicago confirmed to WIRED that Sweet is "on leave from the undergraduate college." It's unclear how Sweet was recruited to DOGE, but a public GitHub account indicates that he was working on this issue even before he joined Musk's demolition crew. The "CLSweet" GitHub account, which WIRED has linked to Sweet, created an application that tracks and analyzes federal government regulations "showing how regulatory burden is distributed across government agencies." The application was last updated in March 2025, weeks before Sweet joined HUD. One HUD source who heard about Sweet's possible role in revising the agency's regulations said the effort was redundant, since the agency was already "put through a multi-year multi-stakeholder meatgrinder before any rule was ever created" under the Administrative Procedure Act. (This law dictates how agencies are allowed to establish regulations and allows for judicial oversight over everything an agency does.) Another HUD source said Sweet's title seemed to make little sense. "A programmer and a quantitative data analyst are two very different things," they noted. Sweet has virtually no online footprint. One of the only references to him online is a short biography on the website of East Edge Securities, an investment firm Sweet founded in 2023 with two other students from the University of Chicago. The biography is short on details but claims that Sweet has worked in the past with several private equity firms, including Pertento Partners, which is based in London, and Tenzing Global Investors, based in San Francisco. He is also listed as a board member of Paragon Global Investments, which is a student-run hedge fund. The biography also mentions that Sweet "will be joining Nexus Point Capital as a private equity summer analyst." The company has headquarters in Hong Kong and Shanghai and describes itself as "an Asian private equity fund with a strategic focus on control opportunities in the Greater China market." East Edge Securities, Pertento Partners, Tenzing Global Investors, Paragon Global Investments, and Nexus Point Capital did not respond to requests for comment. The only other online account associated with Sweet appears to be a Substack account using the same username as the GitHub account. That account has not posted any content and follows mostly finance and market-related newsletters. It also follows Bari Weiss' The Free Press and the newsletter of Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley billionaire investor and group chat enthusiast who said he spent a lot of time advising Trump and his team after the election. DOGE representatives have been at HUD since February, when WIRED reported that two of those staffers were given application-level access to some of the most critical and sensitive systems inside the agency. Earlier this month, US representative Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, said DOGE had "infiltrated our nation's housing agencies, stealing funding Congress provided to communities, illegally terminating staff, including in your districts, and accessing confidential data about people living in assisted housing, including sexual assault survivors." This story originally appeared at WIRED.com

A DOGE recruiter is staffing a project to deploy AI agents across the US government

A young entrepreneur who was among the earliest known recruiters for Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has a new, related gig -- and he's hiring. Anthony Jancso, cofounder of AcclerateX, a government tech startup, is looking for technologists to work on a project that aims to have artificial intelligence perform tasks that are currently the responsibility of tens of thousands of federal workers. Jancso, a former Palantir employee, wrote in a Slack with about 2000 Palantir alumni in it that he's hiring for a "DOGE orthogonal project to design benchmarks and deploy AI agents across live workflows in federal agencies," according to an April 21 post reviewed by WIRED. Agents are programs that can perform work autonomously. We've identified over 300 roles with almost full-process standardization, freeing up at least 70k FTEs for higher-impact work over the next year," he continued, essentially claiming that tens of thousands of federal employees could see many aspects of their job automated and replaced by these AI agents. Workers for the project, he wrote, would be based on site in Washington, DC, and would not require a security clearance; it isn't clear for whom they would work. Palantir did not respond to requests for comment. The post was not well received. Eight people reacted with clown face emojis, three reacted with a custom emoji of a man licking a boot, two reacted with custom emoji of Joaquin Phoenix giving a thumbs down in the movie Gladiator, and three reacted with a custom emoji with the word "Fascist." Three responded with a heart emoji. "DOGE does not seem interested in finding 'higher impact work' for federal employees," one person said in a comment that received 11 heart reactions. "You're complicit in firing 70k federal employees and replacing them with shitty autocorrect." "Tbf we're all going to be replaced with shitty autocorrect (written by chatgpt)," another person commented, which received one "+1" reaction. "How 'DOGE orthogonal' is it? Like, does it still require Kremlin oversight?" another person said in a comment that received five reactions with a fire emoji. "Or do they just use your credentials to log in later?" AccelerateX was originally called AccelerateSF, which VentureBeat reported in 2023 had received support from OpenAI and Anthropic. In its earliest incarnation, AccelerateSF hosted a hackathon for AI developers aimed at using the technology to solve San Francisco's social problems. According to a 2023 Mission Local story, for instance, Jancso proposed that using large language models to help businesses fill out permit forms to streamline the construction paperwork process might help drive down housing prices. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. Anthropic spokesperson Danielle Ghiglieri tells WIRED that the company "never invested in AccelerateX/SF," but did sponsor a hackathon AccelerateSF hosted in 2023 by providing free access to its API usage at a time when its Claude API "was still in beta.") In 2024, the mission pivoted, with the venture becoming known as AccelerateX. In a post on X announcing the change, the company posted, "Outdated tech is dragging down the US Government. Legacy vendors sell broken systems at increasingly steep prices. This hurts every American citizen." AccelerateX did not respond to a request for comment. According to sources with direct knowledge, Jancso disclosed that AccelerateX had signed a partnership agreement with Palantir in 2024. According to the LinkedIn of someone described as one of AccelerateX's cofounders, Rachel Yee, the company looks to have received funding from OpenAI's Converge 2 Accelerator. Another of AccelerateSF's cofounders, Kay Sorin, now works for OpenAI, having joined the company several months after that hackathon. Sorin and Yee did not respond to requests for comment. Jancso's cofounder, Jordan Wick, a former Waymo engineer, has been an active member of DOGE, appearing at several agencies over the past few months, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Education. In 2023, Jancso attended a hackathon hosted by ScaleAI; WIRED found that another DOGE member, Ethan Shaotran, also attended the same hackathon. Since its creation in the first days of the second Trump administration, DOGE has pushed the use of AI across agencies, even as it has sought to cut tens of thousands of federal jobs. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, a DOGE associate suggested using AI to write code for the agency's website; at the General Services Administration, DOGE has rolled out the GSAi chatbot; the group has sought to automate the process of firing government employees with a tool called AutoRIF; and a DOGE operative at the Department of Housing and Urban Development is using AI tools to examine and propose changes to regulations. But experts say that deploying AI agents to do the work of 70,000 people would be tricky if not impossible. A federal employee with knowledge of government contracting, who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, says, "A lot of agencies have procedures that can differ widely based on their own rules and regulations, and so deploying AI agents across agencies at scale would likely be very difficult." Oren Etzioni, cofounder of the AI startup Vercept, says that while AI agents can be good at doing some things -- like using an internet browser to conduct research -- their outputs can still vary widely and be highly unreliable. For instance, customer service AI agents have invented nonexistent policies when trying to address user concerns. Even research, he says, requires a human to actually make sure what the AI is spitting out is correct. "We want our government to be something that we can rely on, as opposed to something that is on the absolute bleeding edge," says Etzioni. "We don't need it to be bureaucratic and slow, but if corporations haven't adopted this yet, is the government really where we want to be experimenting with the cutting edge AI?" Etzioni says that AI agents are also not great 1-1 fits for job replacements. Rather, AI is able to do certain tasks or make others more efficient, but the idea that the technology could do the jobs of 70,000 employees would not be possible. "Unless you're using funny math," he says, "no way." Jancso, first identified by WIRED in February, was one of the earliest recruiters for DOGE in the months before Donald Trump was inaugurated. In December, Jancso, who sources told WIRED said he had been recruited by Steve Davis, president of the Musk-founded Boring Company and a current member of DOGE, used the Palantir alumni group to recruit DOGE members. On December 2nd, 2024, he wrote, "I'm helping Elon's team find tech talent for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the new admin. This is a historic opportunity to build an efficient government, and to cut the federal budget by 1/3. If you're interested in playing a role in this mission, please reach out in the next few days." According to one source at SpaceX, who asked to remain anonymous as they are not authorized to speak to the press, Jancso appeared to be one of the DOGE members who worked out of the company's DC office in the days before inauguration along with several other people who would constitute some of DOGE's earliest members. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. Palantir was cofounded by Peter Thiel, a billionaire and longtime Trump supporter with close ties to Musk. Palantir, which provides data analytics tools to several government agencies including the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security, has received billions of dollars in government contracts. During the second Trump administration, the company has been involved in helping to build a "mega API" to connect data from the Internal Revenue Service to other government agencies, and is working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to create a massive surveillance platform to identify immigrants to target for deportation. This story originally appeared at WIRED.com.

DOGE Put a College Student in Charge of Using AI to Rewrite Regulations

A DOGE operative has been tasked with using AI to propose rewrites to the Department of Housing and Urban Development's regulations -- an effort sources are told will roll out across government. A young man with no government experience who has yet to even complete his undergraduate degree is working for Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and has been tasked with using artificial intelligence to rewrite the agency's rules and regulations. Christopher Sweet was introduced to HUD employees as being originally from San Francisco and most recently a third-year at the University of Chicago, where he was studying economics and data science, in an email sent to staffers earlier this month. "I'd like to share with you that Chris Sweet has joined the HUD DOGE team with the title of special assistant, although a better title might be 'Al computer programming quant analyst,'" Scott Langmack, a DOGE staffer and chief operating officer of an AI real estate company, wrote in an email widely shared within the agency and reviewed by WIRED. "With family roots from Brazil, Chris speaks Portuguese fluently. Please join me in welcoming Chris to HUD!" Sweet's primary role appears to be leading an effort to leverage artificial intelligence to review HUD's regulations, compare them to the laws on which they are based, and identify areas where rules can be relaxed or removed altogether. (He has also been given read access to HUD's data repository on public housing, known as the Public and Indian Housing Center Information Center, and its enterprise income verification systems, according to sources within the agency.) Plans for the industrial-scale deregulation of the US government were laid out in detail in the Project 2025 policy document that the Trump administration has effectively used as a playbook during its first 100 days in power. The document, written by a who's who of far-right figures, many of whom now hold positions of power within the administration, pushes for deregulation in areas like the environment, food and drug enforcement, and diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. One area Sweet is focusing on is regulation related to the Office of Public and Indian Housing (PIH), according to sources who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press. Sweet -- who two sources have been told is the lead on the AI deregulation project for the entire administration -- has produced an Excel spreadsheet with around a thousand rows containing areas of policy where the AI tool has flagged that HUD may have "overreached" and suggesting replacement language. Staffers from PIH are, specifically, asked to review the AI's recommendations and justify their objections to those they don't agree with. "It all sounds crazy -- having AI recommend revisions to regulations," one HUD source says. "But I appreciated how much they're using real people to confirm and make changes." Once the PIH team completes the review, their recommendations will be submitted to the Office of the General Counsel for approval. One HUD source says they were told that the AI model being used for this project is "being refined by our work to be used across the government." To do this, the source says they were told in a meeting attended by Sweet and Jacob Altik, another known DOGE member who has worked as an attorney at Weil, Gotshal & Mangesthat, the model will crawl through the Code of Federal Regulations (eCFR),

DOGE Recruits College Kid to Help Rewrite Housing Regulations with AI

Elon Musk may be leaving Washington D.C., but his DOGE initiative continues to rampage through the government, causing chaos and cutting vital federal programs that millions of Americans rely on. Case in point: Wired now reports that the initiative has hired a "young man with no government experience" to help revise federal regulations at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That man, Christopher Sweet, hasn't even completed his undergraduate degree yet, the outlet claims. Wired cites internal emails and people with knowledge of Sweet's recruitment show how he was recently welcomed onboard at the agency: “I'd like to share with you that Chris Sweet has joined the HUD DOGE team with the title of special assistant, although a better title might be â€~Al computer programming quant analyst,’" an email sent by DOGE staffer Scott Lanmack reads. “With family roots from Brazil, Chris speaks Portuguese fluently. Please join me in welcoming Chris to HUD!†Sweet's role with the government will apparently involve an effort to use software to revise and downsize government regulations at the housing agency. The outlet writes: Sweet’s primary role appears to be leading an effort to leverage artificial intelligence to review HUD’s regulations, compare them to the laws on which they are based, and identify areas where rules can be relaxed or removed altogether. (He has also been given read access to HUD's data repository on public housing, known as the Public and Indian Housing Center Information Center, and its enterprise income verification systems, according to sources within the agency.) Sweet's recruitment is very much in line with DOGE's overall modus operandi, which seems to be this: hire young, expendable tech nerds who don't know what they're doing, hurl them into legally sketchy activities that involve complex government processes, watch them flail and tell the public what a great job they're doing. Indeed, DOGE's army of pimply-faced government deconstructionists often seems so out of their depth that it's a wonder that Washington D.C. isn't literally on fire right now. Speaking to reporters at the White House on Wednesday, Elon Musk admitted the initiative has fallen far short of his promise to cut $2 trillion in spending and had made many mistakes. "I think we're probably getting things right 70-80% of the time," he said. That's not a great hit rate when millions of people's lives depend on government programs. All of it seems to support the working theory that DOGE isn't really interested in making the government more efficient, but is actually trying to destroy a large number of agencies. Such a mandate would better align it with the policy blueprint laid out during Trump's campaign: the right-wing libertarian Project 2025, which has sought to cut all but bare necessities of government. Further supporting this theory is the fact that, despite DOGE's apparent mission to cut government spending, the U.S. spent $220 billion more during Trump's first 100 days compared to the spending rates during the same period in 2024.