DOGE staffers use ChatGPT to identify NEH grants for cancellation

Between March 12 and April 1, 2025, DOGE team led by Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh used OpenAI's ChatGPT to identify National Endowment for the Humanities grants to cancel, terminating 97% of the agency's active grants worth more than $100 million in 22 days. They fed grant descriptions into ChatGPT, asked it whether each was a "DEI" program, and used its outputs to build a termination spreadsheet. The automated process flagged grants about Holocaust history, Native American language preservation, and Appalachian photo archives as DEI violations based solely on keywords like "LGBTQ," "tribal," "BIPOC," and "gay." Neither Fox nor Cavanaugh could define what DEI meant under oath during depositions in January 2026.