Our National Summer At Camp Runamok

WIRED:

A YOUNG MAN with no government experience who has yet to even complete his undergraduate degree is working for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and has been tasked with using artificial intelligence to rewrite the agency’s rules and regulations.

The Texas Legislature, decades ago, decided to codify Texas law. It went from Vernon’s Statues (the original publisher of Texas law, IIRC. Long out of business, but the name stuck.), into Codes. Government Code, Family Law, Probate, Civil, Criminal, and so on. Each statute had to be renumbered and reorganized, as well as rewritten. That was the crucial part: the rewritten codes couldn’t change the original statutes. Statutory interpretation depends on the wording: change the words, change the interpretation. But that was not the legislative intent. The intent was to make Texas law easier to find and follow. (I haven’t had to look at a Texas Code for over 30 years, but I could find the section I was looking for in a few minutes. I learned and worked (briefly) with Vernon’s. I wouldn’t know where to start in those.) It was a worthwhile endeavor, but it took years.

Remember the promise that all the emails government employees were required to send in to DOGE would be read by AI? And then the inbox backed up from the unread emails? Yeah; that’s how well this is going to work. 

There’s also the problem of not changing the regulations. AI is not a lawyer, nor a judge. It doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, and it doesn’t know how to think like a lawyer. Neither does the young know-nothing in charge of this project. 

Assuming he doesn’t want to change the regulations, that is. If he does, he’s definitely not a lawyer; because a lawyer would know that project is against the law.

Not the criminal law; but administrative law. The law companies and people rely on; just like they rely on government regulations. Which means those regulations must be reliable, not changed at the whim of a child and in the “black box” of AI.  That creates all kinds of problems that government isn’t supposed to create. Revising or adding or deleting regulations is itself a regulated process. It takes time, involves a lot of people, including the public, and if it isn’t done right, the changes are invalid. Period, end of.

Sweet’s primary role appears to be leading an effort to leverage artificial intelligence to review HUD’s regulations, compare them to the laws on which they are based, and identify areas where rules can be relaxed or removed altogether.

Again: what does AI know? Fuck all. It knows how to make up case law, which means it “knows “ to do what it’s asked to do. Something a first year law student would know was NOT what was asked for.

Another source told WIRED that Sweet has also been using the tool at other parts of HUD. WIRED reviewed a copy of the output of the AI’s review of one HUD department, which features columns displaying text that the AI model found to be needing an adjustment while also including suggestions from the AI for alterations to be made, essentially proposing rewrites. The spreadsheet details how many words can be eliminated from individual regulations and gives a percentage figure indicating how noncompliant the regulations are. It isn’t clear how these percentages are calculated.

Close enough is not good enough. And deregulation, which is the measure of noncompliance referred to, has to be authorized by Congress. That’s what statutes are for:

One HUD source who heard about Sweet’s possible role in revising the agency’s regulations said the effort was redundant, since the agency was already “put through a multi-year multi-stakeholder meatgrinder before any rule was ever created” under the Administrative Procedure Act. (This law dictates how agencies are allowed to establish regulations and allows for judicial oversight over everything an agency does.)

Another HUD source said Sweet’s title seemed to make little sense. “A programmer and a quantitative data analyst are two very different things,” they noted.

The President can’t suspend or cancel that “multi-year multi-stakeholder meat grinder” just because it inconveniences his “agenda.”

So, a bunch more lawsuits, incoming. The story of the second Trump Administration, in one sentence. Trump isn’t overseeing an administration. He’s the Chief looney at Camp Runamok.