Housing and Urban Development
DOGE’s involvement at HUD has ostensibly been focused on fraud and waste rather than IT modernization. At the start, the DOGE staff at the agency focused on cancelling contracts, especially if it could find opportunities to eliminate those focused on DEI or other initiatives to restore equity. There have also been efforts to use highly sensitive HUD databases as a way to get access to extremely private information such as the income and wages of every American, when earlier attempts to retrieve such information at Social Security and the IRS ran into legal opposition. DOGE claims this is needed for the administration’s anti-immigration efforts, but it’s not hard to imagine many other shady scenarios for this data. Around the middle of April, DOGE added a third staffer at the agency who is piloting effort to use a Large Language Model (LLM) to identify housing regulations to repeal.
Positions
| Position | Date | Person |
|---|---|---|
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HUD
2/10
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appointed Senior Advisor «assuming appointed» Wired | |
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HUD
2/10
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unknown Wired | |
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HUD
c.4/10
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appointed Special Assistant Wired |
Systems
| System | Dates | Access |
|---|---|---|
| FASS-PH |
A database to measure the financial condition of public housing agencies and assess their ability to provide safe and decent housing.
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| HUDCAPS |
Integrated management system for Section 8 programs under the jurisdiction of the Office of Public and Indian Housing
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| HEMS |
A database for tracking housing discrimination complaints and enforcement actions, including accusations of domestic violence
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| IDIS |
A database for tracking all HUD programs nationwide, it includes hidden locations of domestic violence shelters
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| LOCCS |
Handles disbursement and cash management for the majority of HUD's grant programs
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| WASS |
System for authorizing access and setting permissions to talk to other systems at HUD
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Events
| Agency | Date | Event |
|---|---|---|
|
1/26
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||
| February 2025 | ||
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2/10
|
Sighting:
Multiple employees at HUD receive an email from new DOGE staffer Scott Langmack asking them to list every contract at HUD and whether it is critical to HUD’s mission and/or has DEI components.
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2/13
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||
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2/26
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||
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2/26
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Sighting:
There is reportedly a 6-person DOGE team working at HUD, with 4 of the staff being existing HUD employees and Michael Mirski and Scott Langmack as the representatives from DOGE.
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|
| April 2025 | ||
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4/01
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||
|
c.4/10
|
Onboard:
Scott Langmack sends a message to HUD staff announcing that “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 ‘AI computer programming quant analyst.’”
(fuzz: Date is unspecified, just sometime earlier in April)
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4/11
|
Disruption:
Luke Farritor uses his admin access to lock out all government officials at multiple agencies from using grants.gov to issue new grants. Instead, all grants must now be sent to a new email address which will be reviewed by DOGE staffers before grants can be posted.
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4/15
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||
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c.4/15
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Access:
Christopher Sweet is reported to be using an AI model to analyze HUD regulations and suggest revisions. These are presented to HUD staff for review in a large spreadsheet. It is not clear how the AI system is making these determinations.
(fuzz: Date is unspecified, just sometime earlier in April)
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|
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c.4/20
|
Interagency:
In a meeting between HUD and DOGE, Jacob Altik says they are planning to use Christopher Sweet’s AI model analyzing regulations at HUD to review the entire Code of Federal regulations for regulations to review.
(fuzz: Date is unspecified, just sometime earlier in April)
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| May 2025 | ||
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5/12
|
Disruption:
In a retaliation against the university coordinated by GSA, grants for Harvard University from DOD, HUD, the Department of Energy and the Department of Education are all terminated. There were 200 grants from DOD alone. The stated reasons varied but included that they no longer effectuated the administration’s priorities or directly accusing Harvard of fostering antisemitism on campus.
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| June 2025 | ||
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6/25
|
Disruption:
In a surprise move, the Republican governor of Virginia, the head of public buildings service at GSA and the Commissioner for HUD announce that they will be kicking out the National Science Foundation (NSF) from its Virginia headquarters and moving HUD to that location. There are no details provided on where NSF is expected to relocate to.
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6/26
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Official:
In an email to agency partners, the operators of grants.gov declare that the revised mechanism added in April that routed all Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) through a DOGE email address has been reversed. Instead, agencies are to return to using the tool like that did previously. This doesn’t necessarily mean that DOGE or political appointees will not be reviewing grants, but they have no longer locked other users out of the system.
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| July 2025 | ||
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c.7/01
|
Action:
Christopher Sweet participates in a meeting at HUD to discuss more permanent hosting options for the AI deregulation tool which had been running internally. This could be the precursor to providing it as a service to other agencies.
(fuzz: Meeting reported as in week of 2025-06-30)
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