Christopher Sweet, an affiliate of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, requested college credit for his time in government, according to new documents obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal organization.
Sweet was stationed at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and in emails between Sweet and Scott Langmack, another DOGE affiliate at HUD, it appears that Sweet was looking to frame his work at HUD as an independent study worth three college credits. Sweet joined HUD in the spring of 2025 as an undergraduate college student at the University of Chicago to work on building an AI tool that would crawl through the agency’s rules and regulations and flag them for rescission—the cancellation of contracts. The tool, called SweetRex, was intended to be rolled out across the federal government.
In an August 26, 2025 email titled “Which of these should go to U Chicago,” Langmack wrote to Sweet saying, “I need to send them something that has specific framework of the different courses/credits we want them to give you.”
Documents attached to the email show that Sweet’s work was divided into four potential 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. It appears these were meant to lead to a final proposed thesis focused on “the design, implementation, and impact of integrated AI, data science, software engineering, and legal authority analysis to rationalize outdated federal regulations.” The documents make clear that Sweet’s work was not an internship but “graduate-level, multi-disciplinary research producing real-world outputs that are already influencing federal regulatory reform.”
It appears that the final outline that was created to send to the University of Chicago for approval was created by AI. In an August 27, 2025 email, Langmack tells Sweet, “I did the outline on ChatGPT.”
HUD and the University of Chicago did not reply to requests for comment. WIRED confirmed that Sweet did, in fact, graduate from the University of Chicago this June with a degree in economics, though it is unclear if credits from his time with DOGE contributed to the school’s requirements.
Langmack came to HUD from the property technology company Kukun—whose website describes it as being on “a long-term mission to aggregate the hardest-to-find data”—with zero experience in the federal government. He is now executive director of deregulation AI at the Office of Management and Budget, according to his LinkedIn. Langmack did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“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 toward an undergraduate degree,” says Daniel McGrath, special counsel for oversight at Democracy Forward, describing the case as part of the “Trump-Vance administration’s relentless pursuit to cripple the important work of the federal government.”