DOGE Used AI to Shape Housing Policy. Now HUD Is Blocking Requests to Learn How.

Key points

• The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) withheld more than 100 documents in response to a public-records request about its use of AI in policymaking.
• A nonprofit called Democracy Forward filed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, a formal legal tool citizens and organisations use to obtain government records.
• HUD cited a so-called "AI privilege" to block some records, an exemption that has no basis in federal law, according to legal experts.
• One withheld document, belonging to a DOGE team member, was titled "GPT defined Econ Analysis approach 11 10 25.docx" and labelled "deliberative AI input."
• No US law currently requires the government to disclose when AI has been used to create or change rules and regulations.

A small team inside HUD spent months using AI tools to flag federal rules for potential cancellation. The public still doesn't know exactly how those tools worked, or how much weight their output carried. HUD is refusing to say.

Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal group, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the standard legal mechanism citizens use to demand government records. HUD blocked more than 100 documents in response. Its stated reasons ranged from the genuinely debatable to the legally invented, a split that tells you something about how confident the agency is in its own position.

The team came from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the White House-linked initiative that sent staff into federal agencies early in 2025. As Wired first reported, that HUD team included Christopher Sweet, then a third-year economics student at the University of Chicago, and Scott Langmack, a former executive at a property-technology startup. Sweet's main job, according to HUD employees at the time, was using AI to identify agency rules that could be scrapped or revised. Sweet has since graduated; Langmack now serves as executive director of deregulation AI at the Office of Management and Budget.

Two withheld documents stand out. A file called "GPT defined Econ Analysis approach 11 10 25.docx," belonging to Langmack, was blocked under the label "deliberative AI input." A second file, "RegulatoryAnalysisPrompt.pdf," also Langmack's, appears to show the team was building prompts, the text instructions that tell an AI chatbot what to do, to carry out regulatory analysis.

Did HUD have the legal right to withhold these records?

In most cases, no. The government has nine recognised exemptions under FOIA. HUD leaned heavily on Exemption 5, which protects the back-and-forth between human government employees while they're working through a policy decision. The idea is to protect candid internal debate. But John Davisson, deputy director of enforcement at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says that exemption doesn't stretch to conversations between a person and an AI chatbot. "AI systems, computers are not entitled to candor," he said. HUD also cited a "presidential communications privilege" for at least one prompt document, which raised further questions among legal observers about where those instructions originated.

Should you worry about AI shaping housing rules in secret?

For ordinary people, the concern is concrete. Large language models, the AI systems that power chatbots like ChatGPT, are known to produce confident-sounding errors, reflect biases, or simply get facts wrong. If such a tool helped identify which housing rules to cancel and the public can't see the prompts or outputs, there's no way to check the work.

"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," said Tori Noble, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

No legislation currently forces any US government agency to label a policy decision as AI-assisted. Until that changes, the public may have to take the government's word for how these tools are being used. That's not transparency. It's a gap that Congress has shown little urgency to close, and the people most affected by housing policy are the least likely to know it exists.