This week, a new Trump-approved, Musk-backed DOGE employee sent an email to workers at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development asking for information about all contracts, especially any involving diversity, equity, and inclusion— words that might appear frequently at HUD, given that part of its core mission is to ensure equitable access to housing after decades of government-backed segregation and redlining.
HUD staffers might have been incensed by the email, joining the thousands of other federal employees who’ve received a regular torrent of demands from Musk and his ragtag army of engineers. But as Wired reported, they were probably also confused — or even alarmed — by the person who sent it: Scott Langmack, the COO of a badly named proptech firm, Kukun, which offers real-estate investors information to “grow wealth in life’s game of real estate and home ownership.” The AI-backed platform lets investors put in a few nuggets of information and get answers to questions like whether it’s worth it to remodel, or how much to raise the price of a rental based on factors like the age of the renovation or the neighborhood. Those answers require public data on rents and sales, construction, and permits, and Kukun, like any proptech company, tries to differentiate itself by saying it relies on the “hardest to find data.”
Now, as Wired reports, Langmack is one of two new DOGE appointees from the world of real estate assigned to cut costs at HUD — a job that gives them access to the largest field of data on American housing. Anonymous employees told Wired that these HUD databases include “everything from homelessness rates to environmental and health hazards to federally insured mortgages.” It also includes a lot of info that a proptech executive probably shouldn’t have unfettered access to, like the medical and immigration records of everyone using a Section 8 voucher and the addresses of otherwise hidden domestic-violence shelters.
Before running Kukun, Langmack’s primary work experience seems to be in marketing. He made his name in the 1990s, helping Pepsi differentiate itself from Coke, an experience that taught him to get customers by selling them “the best possible promise to generate emotional engagement and customer loyalty,” as he wrote in a blog post. He left around 1996 for lower pay and less prestige at Microsoft, where he led the less sexy tech-support division. But it was a door into the tech world. By 2013, he had a recruiting start-up — BlueChipExec.com — which Langmack marketed with a self-help book that promised The Fast Track to Your Ideal Job . The intro credits his deadbeat dad with helping him realize, at age 14, that “I would have to earn for myself.” But the recruiting start-up may have been a wash: It’s not even on his LinkedIn, which lists exec roles at a software company, a different recruiter start-up, and Securify.
By the 2008 recession, Langmack was making money on the side as a kind of legal loan shark. “I can reliably get 12 percent, worst case 9 percent,” he told Bloomberg, in a 2009 article on the rise of unregulated peer-to-peer lending networks, including Lending Club, where he was a member before launching his own Incline Fund. And real estate seemed to have been where Langmack spent this money. His wife, Lori Langmack, is a Compass broker, although the last listing on her website sold in 2021. It’s not clear whether he has left his position at Kukun, which means that his current role at DOGE could be used to benefit his private company.
The other DOGE appointee working inside HUD is Michael Mirski, who Wired reported was on a six-month leave from TCC Management, a company that operates mobile-home parks nationally — work that he has said depends on access to data. In his new role, HUD’s oversight over mobile homes also presents a conflict of interest, even if he has temporarily left his position. The company seems to have cleared out the content on its website, but there are small and occasional news items about its purchase of mobile-home parks in the South — a business model that, as The New Yorker reported, may depend on the predatory practice of raising the rent on land under homes that are difficult to uproot, and tend to be occupied by those without the cash to just move or buy a new apartment. Mirski now has the ability to make some changes in a system that determines who can even get into any HUD systems along with access to three of them. Neither Langmack nor Mirski, of course, appear to have gone through the required protocol to be approved for this level of access. But it isn’t just information on individual households that’s concerning; it’s information on $100 billion of funding that Congress has already approved for HUD.