Now that expertise has been ravaged from the agency in one night, and the agency’s former technologists fear that consumer complaints will go unanswered, and companies will be able to get away with shady practices by obscuring them with technical complexity. “Most investigations have some elements of technology, whether it’s an algorithm, a model, some sort of AI, or just data systems,” says one former member of the technology team. “They will claim that it’s too burdensome, or it’s not possible to produce the data … And having someone at the table who understands the databases, who understands the technology at hand is really crucial to being able to push back.”