DOGE Affiliate Sought College Credit for Rewriting Federal Housing Regulations

When we hand someone the power to rewrite the rules that govern housing assistance for millions of Americans, we generally expect that person to have earned that trust through experience, training, or at least a clear line of accountability. New documents suggest that in at least one case, that expectation went out the window.

Christopher Sweet, an affiliate of the Department of Government Efficiency, asked to receive college credit for his time helping overhaul regulations at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the nonprofit legal group Democracy Forward. Sweet joined HUD in the spring of 2025 while still an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, tasked with building an AI tool called SweetRex designed to scan the agency's rules and regulations and flag which ones should be rescinded. The tool was intended for eventual use across the entire federal government.

Think of SweetRex as a very powerful editing assistant, one built to comb through decades of federal housing policy and mark passages for deletion. That is not a small task. HUD's regulations touch everything from fair housing protections to mortgage insurance rules that shape whether families can access safe, affordable homes. Handing that kind of editorial power to an undergraduate, then having that same undergraduate try to convert the experience into class credit, raises real questions about who is actually setting policy in Washington right now.

Emails Show the Push for Academic Credit

The paper trail is fairly direct. In an August 26, 2025 email titled "which of these should go to U Chicago," Scott Langmack, another DOGE affiliate stationed at HUD, wrote to Sweet that he needed "a specific framework of the different courses/credits we want them to give you." Attached documents broke Sweet's work into four proposed courses: "Advanced AI Prompt Engineering for Legal Reasoning," "Applied Data Science for Federal Regulatory Analysis," "Computer Programming for Scalable Al-Legal Systems," and "Legislative & Regulatory Authority in AI-Driven Reform." These were apparently meant to feed into a thesis on using AI, data science, and legal analysis to "rationalize outdated federal regulations."

The documents did not describe Sweet's role as an internship. They called it "graduate-level, multi-disciplinary research producing real-world outputs that are already influencing federal regulatory reform." That is a striking claim to make about the work of an undergraduate still finishing his degree, and it is worth sitting with for a moment. Federal regulatory reform is not a classroom exercise. It has consequences for renters, homeowners, lenders, and local governments who rely on stable, predictable rules.

Perhaps the most telling detail is how the academic proposal itself came together. In an August 27, 2025 email, Langmack told Sweet, "I did the outline on ChatGPT." A framework meant to justify graduate-level credit for reshaping federal housing law was, by Langmack's own account, drafted by an AI chatbot. Neither HUD nor the University of Chicago responded to requests for comment. WIRED did confirm that Sweet graduated from the University of Chicago this June with an economics degree, though it remains unclear whether any DOGE-related credits factored into that outcome.

Langmack's own background adds another layer of concern. He arrived at HUD from Kukun, a property technology company that describes its mission as aggregating "the hardest to find data," with no prior experience in federal government. He has since moved on to become executive director of deregulation AI at the Office of Management and Budget, according to his LinkedIn profile. Langmack did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

Daniel McGrath, special counsel for oversight at Democracy Forward, put the stakes plainly. "These documents raise serious concerns about how one of DOGE's unqualified employees has been entrusted to handle legal work, rewriting rules and regulations that affect millions of Americans, while attempting to count this work towards an undergraduate degree," he said. McGrath framed the episode as part of what he called the "Trump-Vance administration's relentless pursuit to cripple the important work of the federal government."

This case does not exist in isolation. It follows other reporting on DOGE's footprint across agencies, including a FEMA official who was reportedly paid for months by a DOGE member's startup while serving in a shadow administrator role, and the National Design Studio becoming what one report described as a landing pad for DOGE veterans recruiting for engineering positions. Taken together, these accounts point to a pattern: young, often inexperienced affiliates gaining outsized access to sensitive government functions, with few of the traditional guardrails that normally accompany federal service.

Why It Matters

Regulations are not abstract paperwork. They are the accumulated result of public comment periods, legal review, and often hard-won compromises between competing interests, all designed to protect people who rely on housing assistance, fair lending practices, and safe living conditions. When that framework gets treated as raw material for a student's independent study project, built with help from an AI chatbot and pushed through informal email negotiations, the public loses visibility into who is actually making decisions and why.

It also raises a quieter, more troubling question about incentive structures inside DOGE itself. If a college student can frame consequential regulatory work as a stepping stone to a diploma, what does that say about how seriously the broader effort treats the people affected by those rules? Oversight groups like Democracy Forward exist precisely to surface these gaps, but FOIA requests take time, and by the time documents surface, the policy changes in question may already be in motion. For the millions of Americans who depend on HUD's programs, the lesson here is not just about one student's résumé. It is about whether the systems meant to protect them are still functioning as intended.