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 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 & Mangesthat, 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.”