Christopher Sweet New documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Democracy Forward show that Christopher Sweet, an official associated with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), sought college credit for work he performed in the federal government.
Sweet is assigned to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Emails exchanged with Scott Langmack, another DOGE official at HUD, suggest that Sweet was seeking to present his government work as independent research eligible for three college credits. Sweet joined HUD in spring 2025 as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where he helped develop an artificial intelligence tool to analyze HUD rules and regulations and identify contract revocations. The tool, known as SweetRex, was intended for use throughout the federal government.
In an Aug. 26, 2025, email with the subject line “Which one should I send to the University of Chicago,” Langmack told Sweet: “You need to send something that includes a specific framework for the various courses/credits you want to be awarded.”
Attachments to the email show that Sweet’s work was organized into four proposed courses: Advanced AI Prompted Engineering for Legal Reasoning, Applied Data Science for Federal Regulatory Analysis, Computer Programming for Scalable Legal Systems, and Legislative and Regulatory Authority in AI-Driven Reform. The courses appear to have been designed to culminate in a proposal examining “the design, implementation, and impact of integrated AI, data science, software engineering, and legal authority analysis to streamline outdated federal regulations.”
The document states that Sweet’s work was not an internship, but “graduate-level, interdisciplinary research that has produced real-world results that are already impacting federal regulatory reform.”
The final outline prepared for submission to the University of Chicago also appears to have been generated with artificial intelligence. In an Aug. 27, 2025, email, Langmack told Sweet, “The summary was created in ChatGPT.”
HUD and the University of Chicago did not respond to requests for comment. WIRED confirmed that Sweet graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in economics in June 2025, though it remains unclear whether credits connected to his DOGE and HUD work counted toward his degree requirements.
Langmack joined HUD from Kukun, a real estate technology company, without previous federal government experience. Kukun’s website describes the company as pursuing a “long-term mission to aggregate the most difficult-to-find data.” According to LinkedIn, Langmack now serves as executive director of the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Deregulation and AI. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“These documents raise serious concerns that one of DOGE’s unqualified employees is being assigned legal work and attempting to count this work toward earning a bachelor’s degree while rewriting rules and regulations that affect millions of Americans,” said Daniel McGrath, supervising special counsel at Democracy Forward. McGrath described the case as part of “the Trump-Vance administration’s relentless pursuit to cripple the important work of the federal government.”
Source: www.wired.com