DOGE proposal to feed Housing and Urban Development regulations The Woodchipper™, by building an AI tool to [***cough***] analyze [***cough***] all of them, and then provide recommendations to “keep, delete, or partial delete” each one. The default setting — and I know this will surprise you — is “delete.” There is, of course, a PowerPoint presentation.
Documents obtained by Democracy Forward via Freedom of Information Act requests reveal a PowerPoint presentation delivered at HUD on SweetREX1, a tool named for DOGE associate Christopher Sweet, according to Wired reporting last August.
Lambert here: DOGE bros naming software after themselves. Precious!
The new documents, shared with FedScoop and first reported by Lever, laid out a multistep process in which all HUD regulations would be analyzed by the AI. The tool would then provide recommendations to “keep, delete, or partial delete” each rule, per the presentation.
Nevertheless, a source familiar with the FOIA submissions said in an interview with FedScoop that the “explicit instructions’ given by DOGE to HUD employees make clear that “the default assumption is that rules and regulations should be rescinded.”
Lambert here: Abundance liberals: “No, not like that!”
“That presents a lot of concerns, especially [because], as we all know, AI tools are sycophantic and will sort of adopt the preferred outcome of whoever is using them,” the source continued.
“So if the DOGE folks go in with prompting the LLMs such that the LLM … interprets that it should be giving a deregulatory result, then the results will end up being more on rescinding regulations than not.”
The source’s ‘default” deregulatory interpretation is backed up by the FOIA documents. One set of instructions notes that the “deregulation goal is to eliminate any regulatory provisions that may represent potential overreach or impose unnecessary burdens beyond what Congress has legislated.”
“We start with the position that the proposed regulatory eliminations are the default case,” the document continues. “If you disagree with all or part of an elimination, please note it and your rationale in the columns provided in the spreadsheet.”
Lambert here: FedScoop gives DOGE’s PowerPoint slides. Not a hint that elimination is the default case (and you have to believe that SweetREX is optimized not only for the default case, but to bring it about, even before sycophancy comes into play).
Beyond the workforce assumptions, the source questioned how an AI tool is equipped to determine compliance with new rules, including some that appear open to a good bit of interpretation. The documents, for example, point to the Supreme Court’s June 2024 ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo as “reference criteria” for “determining compliance.”
In that decision, the high court ruled that the Administrative Procedure Act “requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.”
The former DOL source said a ‘recent and sweeping’ decision like Loper Bright only ‘vaguely articulates a number of different nonexclusive categories of ways that Congress could have delegated authority to agencies.’
“I think it’s just infeasible for an LLM to come up with reasoned judgments about that,” they said.
Lambert here: I would be surprised if the courts looked with favor on an LLM interpreting Loper Bright, or indeed any court decision.
I hesitate to get into the swamp of Silicon Valley policy proposals, which honestly make the Texas Legislature look like the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, but no doubt SweetREX is a creature from that swamp.
NOTE
1 “Wrecks” [nudge]. Get it? Lord of Misrule, style of thing.
Comments
It’s who has backdoors into the black box,
Fight Dem! Fight dem all!