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AI has now arrived at the Treasury Department. Sam Corcos, a former startup leader and Department of Government Efficiency affiliate now serving as chief information officer at the Treasury Department, appears to have approved spending at least $1.5 million on up to 3,000 licenses for ChatGPT, the OpenAI platform, federal spending records show. The agency has obligations to spend $1.5 million on the services, and has already outlaid more than $500,000 for the technology, those records show. Fast Company obtained a user agreement showing that Treasury is allowing employees to use ChatGPT for authorized mission purposes. Such purposes include using the technology, in certain circumstances, with whats known as controlled unclassified information, a government designation thats given to information that isnt classified, but still requires some safeguarding. The expanded use of the tool comes amid growing pressure on federal agencies to adopt artificial intelligence systems, which advocates say can increase efficiency and cut down on excess bureaucracy. In this case, the rules laid out in the user agreement include strong limits on how AI systems might be usedparticularly, for example, with regards to personally identifiable information, market-sensitive economic information, and federal tax data. The rules also forbid Treasury staffers from trying to tamper with or evade an AI chatbots security measures without express authorization. Employees arent supposed to use the output of an AI system without a human reviewing that work, or obfuscate the role AI played in making a particular product, according to the user agreement. A violation of these rules could lead to someone being fired, the agreement states. One former Treasury official said department staff are probably using the tech on heavy lifting for tasks that would normally take a long time. Tony Arcadi, the official that Sam Corcos replaced, tells Fast Company that there were myriad use cases that could benefit from the technology, including automating administrative work. Done correctly and with robust controls, LLMs could be a force multiplier for intelligence, operations, finance, enforcement, and public engagement,” he says. The agency had previously invested in a smaller cache of ChatGPT licenses.The Treasury Department and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. Still, in September, the agency released a compliance plan focused on promoting the use of AI, as well as a strategy spelling out its approach to the technology. Amid the move to speed up the use of AI throughout the government, including the militarys new GenAI.mil tool, theres still the serious risk of government officials putting too much faith in the far from faultless technology.For example, it seems like a recent report from the Department of Health and Human services may have been created using artificial intelligenceand included fake citations. Federal clerks have used ChatGPT and Perplexity and have ended up including misquotes and other errors in documents.
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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. While national active inventory for sale is still rising year over year, the pace of growth has slowed in recent monthssomething weve been closely documenting for several months for our ResiClub members. The side-by-side maps below help you to see that decelerated rate of inventory growth. Left map: Year-over-year change in metro level active inventory between November 2023 and November 2024 Right map: Year-over-year change in metro level active inventory between November 2024 and November 2025 Click to expand Between November 2023 and November 2024, U.S. active housing inventory for sale rose by 26.1%. Between November 2024 and November 2025, U.S. active housing inventory for sale rose by 12.6%. Some of that percentage deceleration is a denominator effect (i.e., as U.S. active inventory rises, it takes an even larger increase to generate the same year-over-year percentage gain). That said, the deceleration is not only due to a denominator effect. In November 2024, there were 196,885 more U.S. homes for sale than in November 2023. In November 2025, there were 120,003 more U.S. homes for sale than in November 2024. The chart belowyear-over-year unit shift in inventoryhelps us to see the trend without the denominator effect. Why has U.S. active inventory growth slowed? Some of it is due to the number of days on the market not rising as quickly or stabilizing in some markets. Part of the slowdown reflects an increase in delistings in softer markets, as some sellers have thrown in the towel and pulled their listings. And, to a lesser degree, a handful of markets have seen a mild pickup in absorption as existing-home sales have edged up slightly from their multiyear troughs. What does decelerating inventory growth mean? Back in September, I published an article titled “The speed of housing market softening has slowedbut softness remains.” I think that framing still holds for what weve seen in recent months. On a nationally aggregated basis, as inventory growth decelerated in the second half of 2025, so did the pace of market softening. Since then, the U.S. housing market has largely stabilized, with national home price appreciation hovering close to 1% year over year and below U.S. income growth. Of course, there remains significant regional variation: Many pockets of the Midwest and Northeast continue to see mild year-over-year home value gains, while many areas in the Southwest and Southeast are experiencing mild year-over-year declines. What to watch in early 2026? As the nationally aggregated housing market transitions from its seasonally slower period into its seasonally busier spring window, a key question will be how inventory behaves. In particular, it will be important to watch whether the recent uptick in delistings in softer markets comes back online. For example, do homes that were pulled from the market in weaker areassuch as Southwest Floridaquickly reappear once seasonality shifts?
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E-Commerce
Earlier this month, the State Department announced that it was instructing U.S. embassy staff around the world to reject work visa applications from individuals involved in what it described as censorship of Americans speech online. In a cable that was first leaked to Reuters, consular officers were instructed to review LinkedIn profiles of visa applicants mentioning work history involving misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance, and online safety. This work includes journalists and fact-checkers, academics, people working in media literacy, and a broad range of tech workers in a field known as Trust and Safety. This isnt the first such visa restriction stemming from what the Trump administration views as censorship. Nor is it the first Republican assault on academics and tech workers who monitor online disinformation. Instead, this represents the latest escalation in a five-year campaign by the GOP and its allies to discredit misinformation research, which theyve long contended silences conservative views. In April 2022, the Biden administration appointed Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher, to lead the Department of Homeland Securitys Disinformation Governance Board, tasked with aiding government efforts to understand and mitigate false information related to border security, human trafficking, and domestic terrorism. Almost immediately, the board came under attack from Republicans like Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and far-right pundit Tucker Carlson, who likened the body to a Ministry of Truth. Jankowicz herself endured all manner of abuse, including death threats and threats of sexual violence; she resigned her post in May of 2022 and the entire project was shuttered by the end of that summer. In the years since, she cofounded the American Sunlight Project, a nonprofit aimed at protecting Americans from disinformation, and serves as its CEO. The Republican attempt to kneecap disinformation researchers, she says, is part of a broader attack not only on trust and safety or content moderation, but on anybody and any organization that attempts to safeguard our shared reality or the truth. ‘Woke speech police’ There was a time when combating misinformation and foreign interference in elections was a bipartisan effort. In 2018, Facebook was summoned to congress to answer for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a British consultancy was accused of targeting Russian election disinformation to Facebook users. We’re here because of what you, Mr. Zuckerberg, have described as a breach of trust, “Sen. John Thune (R-South Dakota) said to Zuckerberg. Meta and other tech companies soon ramped up their fact-checking operations. Meta began partnering with news outlets like Snopes, the Associated Press, and others, to fact-check viral information online. It also tightened its data-sharing policies, expanded its policy teams, and implemented a global trusted partner program to work with nonprofits to monitor harmful content online. It was an imperfect system, but certainly better than what platforms had done prior to 2016. But those enforcement policies wound up angering Republicans, who felt disproportionately targeted by them. Tech companies were not in fact censoring their freedom of speech. Even if they had been, it wouldnt be a violation of the First Amendment, which only protects citizens from government censorship. The problem was Republicans tendency to disseminate material that contains misleading content. One study found that conservatives were eight times more likely to spread misinformation than those who lean liberal. After 2020, conservative ire at tech companies for censoring their posts reached a fever pitch, fueled by the platforms attempt to regulate anti-vaccine content during the COVID-19 pandemic and their deprioritizing of reports about allegedly compromising information about President Biden on his son Hunter Bidens laptop. By 2023, when Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, became chair of the House Judiciary Committee, his party began subpoenaing Big Tech and research organizations that study online hate speech and misinformation. In tandem, lawsuits from Republican activists against those very research organizations eventually made it politically and financially cumbersome for many of these organizations to continue functioning. The Stanford Internet Observatory, a prominent disinformation watchdog, effectively shuttered its doors due to Republican attacks last year. Big Tech is out to get conservatives, and is increasingly willing to undermine First Amendment values by complying with the Biden Administrations directives that suppress freedom of speech online, Jordan wrote to Zuckerberg in his 2022 subpoena. Because of Big Techs wide reach, it can serve as a powerful and effective partisan arm of the woke speech police. Capitulation As it became clear Donald Trump could defeat Kamala Harris in last years election, Zuckerberg capitulated — first with reticence, then with enthusiasm. In August of last year, he sent a letter to Jordan apologizing for letting the platform go too far in censoring posts related to the COVID-19 vaccinewhich Republicans have sowed skepticism over its perceived safety. Zuckerberg also admitted that Meta demoted posts about the Hunter Biden scandal. Then, this January, shortly before Trumps inauguration, Zuckerberg, wearing a black t-shirt and gold pendant chain, hosted an infamous Facebook Live in which he announced that his company would no longer invest in fact-checking. Echoing Gaetz and Carlson, the CEO attacked legacy media for focusing too much on the threat of misinformation to democracy. Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, he said. Theres also a significant financial motivation behind divesting from trust and safety initiatives. They don’t want to spend all that money on what is a very expensive investment, Jankowicz says. By Metas own estimates the company has spent $20 billion on trust and safety operations since 2016. Its one thing for tech companies to fire their fact-checkers and content moderators — for the most part, theyre within their legal right to do so, as long as they figure out an alternative way to remove child abuse material. Its a very different thing for the government to obstruct tech companies from hiring content moderators, which arguably is a violation of the companys first amendment rights. Theoora Skeadas, a former associate on Twitters Public Policy team, worries that the new rules will be used to harass trust and safety workers in the same way researchers like Jankowicz have been harassed. The work we do as trust and safety workers involves ensuring safe experiences for children and women online, and fighting fraud, terrorism, and hate, she says. I observe the irony, too, that this measure entails heavy-handed censorship. Skeadas says that trust & safety workers are scrubbing their LinkedIn of the keywords the government might find objectionable. A Faustian bargain While Big Tech CEOs were quick to speak out against the Trump administrations blanket $100,000 fees for H-1B workerswhich would have disproportionately impacted foreign software engineers working for major tech firms (and now appears to have been dramatically narrowed in scope)not a single CEO has spoken out against these new rules. That might be because the newfound allyship with Trump seems to be paying off for the platforms. The Trump administration has spent much of this year attacking foreign tech regulators, including in the E.U., which recently passed the Digital Services Actrequiring social media companies to more aggressively police disinformation and other illegal contentand the Digital Markets Act, which was designed to curb Big Techs anti-competitive practices. Since the administration has been in office, there has been an increasing amount of pressure and, I would say, attacks on regulators, civil servants, and researchers abroad as well, Jankowicz says. The administration has even sanctioned foreign officials for attempting to regulate Big Tech companies. This summer, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced very similar restrictions to the H1B memo for foreign government workers who the administration viewed as targeting Americans First amendment rights. The administration sanctioned Brazil Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, and, later, his wife, under this new policy in what appears to be a politically motivated retribution for ordering Twitter be blocked in Brazil and later extended the sanctions to his wife. For the tech companies, theres a clear upside to this Faustian bargain: Go along with the administrations narrative on censorshipeven if that means sacrificing the safety of your own workers and risking the further fracturing of American societyand the entire might of the U.S. government will reward you.
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