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Brian Barrett: Yeah. That's a good point. In some ways it's as if not more important to be really vocal and visible saying, "Hey, we
Brian Barrett: Yeah. That's a good point. In some ways it's as if not more important to be really vocal and visible saying, "Hey, we don't all think the same about this." Yeah, regardless of the outcome and the money behind it. Leah Feiger: Speaking of AI in politics, I'm going to talk about one of my favorite topics as always, DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency, started by Elon Musk. It's still in the news, and it is in the news for a very specific reason for us this week, which is we can't get more news out about it. Members of DOGE who are working at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, used AI to inform policy decisions. This is something that we were reporting on and figured out last year, but now the agency appears to be denying Freedom of Information Act requests for information on the development and the use of the AI tools and the way they actually informed these policy decisions. This all came out according to documents obtained by a FOIA request from Democracy Forward, which is a nonprofit legal organization.
And it's pretty concerning. You would assume that a year after some of this dust has settled, that we'd be able to get a little bit more information. And from government agency to government agency, HUD really is the latest example here. We've been just getting tons of stonewalling on additional further details as to what DOGE has been up to, the access they had, the materials they used. It's very much about the fact that they used AI, but it's also how did they use AI? What is still left in the systems? And what were the regulations there? What got blown by? Who knew about this? And these are so many important details that are just missing. And especially now as people are going back and trying to untangle the spaghetti web that was left in their steed. It's very frustrating for employees, understandably, and frankly should be frustrating for anyone who is going to be impacted by housing policy in the next 20 years in America. Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I mean, I think it speaks to an issue that we're all grappling with, which is AI tools can be used in ways that are very legitimate and helpful.
If you told me that they were using AI for research and checking their sources, I would be like, "Seems smart, cool." And then it can be used in ways that are possibly introducing discrimination. It could be used in ways that some would call cheating. And I think the just huge range and the types of tools available, they create a lot of questions, and questions that I would say the public is entitled to some form of answers on. But like you said, right now we're being a little bit stonewalled. Leah Feiger: You're 100 percent right, Zoë. And in this specific case, HUD employees who spoke to WIRED at the time that this all was coming out found that these DOGE employees were using AI to identify agency rules for potential rescission or contract cancellations. And this was happening across government. But again, I just want to be so clear about what this means as they were saying, "Here's this massive list of contracts. What do you think we should cut here?" And just kind of like, "Let's see what happens." Again, we don't have more details on everything that got cut, the way that it got cut, the way that it all went down, what we're missing now as a result.
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