Wired reports:

On February 10, employees at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) received an email asking them to list every contract at the bureau and note whether or not it was “critical” to the agency, as well as whether it contained any DEI components. This email was signed by Scott Langmack, who identified himself as a senior adviser to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Langmack, according to his LinkedIn, already has another job: He’s the chief operating officer of Kukun, a property technology company that is, according to its website, “on a long-term mission to aggregate the hardest to find data.”

As is the case with other DOGE operatives—Tom Krause, for example, is performing the duties of the fiscal assistant secretary at the Treasury while holding down a day job as a software CEO at a company with millions in contracts with the Treasury—this could potentially create a conflict of interest, especially given a specific aspect of his role: According to sources and government documents reviewed by WIRED, Langmack has application-level access to some of the most critical and sensitive systems inside HUD, one of which contains records mapping billions of dollars in expenditures.

Another DOGE operative WIRED has identified is Michael Mirski, who works for TCC Management, a Michigan-based company that owns and operates mobile home parks across the US, and graduated from the Wharton School in 2014. (In a story he wrote for the school’s website, he asserted that the most important thing he learned there was to “Develop the infrastructure to collect data.”) According to the documents, he has write privileges on—meaning he can input overall changes to—a system that controls who has access to HUD systems.

Between them, records reviewed by WIRED show, the DOGE operatives have access to five different HUD systems. According to a HUD source with direct knowledge, this gives the DOGE operatives access to vast troves of data. These range from the individual identities of every single federal public housing voucher holder in the US, along with their financial information, to information on the hospitals, nursing homes, multifamily housing, and senior living facilities that HUD helps finance, as well as data on everything from homelessness rates to environmental and health hazards to federally insured mortgages.

Put together, experts and HUD sources say, all of this could give someone with access unique insight into the US real estate market. [Continue reading…]