Summary: A quiet but aggressive initiative is underway inside the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It doesn’t make the evening news or trend on social media—but it deserves your attention. A college student with a near-zero public profile is weaponizing artificial intelligence in a government office to unravel decades of housing regulations. What’s really happening isn’t about modernization. It’s about control, power consolidation, and the strategic dismantling of regulatory safeguards built over generations.
The Cast: One Student, Many Questions
Meet Christopher Sweet. Twenty-something. University of Chicago. Studying economics and data science. Works at HUD in a role dubbed “special assistant,” though internal chatter suggests “AI computer programming quant analyst” would be more honest. He hails from San Francisco and floated into Washington D.C. through the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—a high-sounding office with vague objectives but a sharp mission: deregulation on an industrial scale.
Here’s where it turns sharp. Sweet has full access to HUD’s deepest data stores: the Public and Indian Housing Information Center and the enterprise income verification systems. These datasets include sensitive, detailed records of federal housing operations, tenant eligibility, verification protocols, and more. That’s not light intern work—it’s top-tier systems with deep compliance consequences.
What He’s Actually Doing: The Spreadsheet Revolution
Sweet’s main assignment? Feed HUD’s regulation books into an AI model to flag anything that doesn’t strictly track the laws they’re based on. His resulting output—an Excel spreadsheet one HUD insider called “weaponized bureaucracy”—includes nearly a thousand rows. These entries propose rolling back or replacing HUD rules that the AI, under his oversight, deemed as “overreach.”
Think about that: not suggest improvements—not increase clarity—not bring efficiency. Just strip it. Remove complexity, remove nuance, and remove protections. That’s not efficiency. That’s subtraction disguised as reform.
Regulation vs. Ideology: Project 2025’s Blueprint
This isn’t an isolated student project. It connects directly to a larger push backed by far-right figures and baked into a 900-page vision called Project 2025. The objective: cut down the reach of federal agencies. Not just at HUD—but across the board. They’ve targeted areas like environmental protection, food and prescription oversight, and equity regulations. These aren’t tweaks. They are erasers.
One can’t separate Sweet’s spreadsheet from that greater ideological mission. His work is only a fragment of a machine trying to grind down entire pillars of public administration—and do it under the banner of efficiency, not ideology. That rebranding is both clever and dangerous.
AI as a Blade, Not a Tool
The AI model Sweet oversees is being trained inside HUD, but its intended use goes far wider. According to one internal source, HUD staff are told they’re “refining the model to be used across government.”
Think through what that means: A single student-managed model, most likely hosted on GitHub before it was ever tested at scale, is now being fine-tuned with federal rulebooks. Then duplicated across other departments. Ask yourself: who owns the code? What are its biases? And how much actual oversight stands between a flawed output and a policy rollback?
And more to the point: Why would a government agency turn to a private, experimental AI tool to question regulations that have survived years of stakeholder engagement, public comment, and congressional oversight?
HUD Pushback: Redundant and Misguided
One agency source was blunt: “Redundant.” Regulations at HUD aren’t written casually—they pass through the multi-year, multi-committee labor grinder demanded by the Administrative Procedure Act. Very few are optional. Even fewer are accidental.
Staffers in HUD’s Office of Public and Indian Housing now have to justify their objections to AI-recommended rollbacks. This turns the process on its head. Instead of AI supporting the agency, the agency must now defend its existence against the student’s AI model. Sweet may not have any formal authority—but make no mistake, his spreadsheet is writing the first draft of what stays and what goes.
Who is Christopher Sweet? A Cipher
Outside of DOGE and HUD, you’ll find almost nothing about Sweet. A brief blip on East Edge Securities—an investment firm he co-founded with two fellow UChicago students in 2023—offers the only online record. No interviews. No academic contributions. No public-facing policy statements. Virtually no transparency on how he got his role or who is managing his work.
Something doesn’t add up. Programmer and quantitative analyst are very different profiles. So which one is Sweet? The answer matters not just because of credentials—but because of responsibility.
The Quiet Collision Coming
This story raises a hard question: What happens when AI isn’t used to support governance but to quietly erode it? What kind of government allows its core functions to be rewritten by black-box tools run by students with investment start-ups?
Even those who ideologically support deregulation should pause here. Shouldn’t reform be transparent? Shouldn’t it be accountable? Shouldn’t it be led by civil servants with institutional memory—not young operators under vague titles with blank resumes?
Now Ask Yourself
What’s really driving this? Why now, just as various departments are beginning to enforce decades-delayed efforts toward equity and data transparency? And what happens when HUD’s precedent is duplicated at Energy, Health, or Treasury?
Nobody voted for this model—or this spreadsheet. Yet here it is, quietly rewriting policies affecting millions of Americans. If this is what “efficiency” looks like in the 21st-century state, then it’s time for a harder look at who gets to define “efficient”—and who profits from its weaponization.
When quiet changes shake the biggest structures, saying nothing becomes complicity.
#RegulationRollback #ArtificialIntelligence #PolicyByAI #HUDWatch #Project2025 #GovernmentOversight #PublicHousingPolicy #DataEthics #AdministrativeLaw #AccountableTechnology
Featured Image courtesy of Unsplash and Element5 Digital (ls8Kc0P9hAA)
