DOGE used ChatGPT to cut 97% of humanities grants, depositions reveal

"The National Endowment for the Humanities is a federal agency created by Congress in 1965 to fund public humanities projects: museum exhibits, oral history archives, language preservation, scholarly research, documentary films, and library collections. It distributes grants to universities, libraries, schools, and community organizations in all 50 states. In 2024, it had roughly 1,400 active grants totaling more than $100 million. Between March 12 and April 1, 2025, a DOGE team wiped out 97% of those grants in 22 days and terminated 65% of the agency's employees.\n\nThe team was led by JFJustin Fox, a former investment banker who had worked at Nexus Capital Management, and NCNate Cavanaugh, 29, a college dropout who co-founded an intellectual property tech startup called Brainbase and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021. Neither had a background in humanities, public administration, or grant-making. Their DOGE assignment made them among the most consequential actors in the dismantling of a 60-year-old federal cultural institution."

"To determine which grants to cancel, Fox and Cavanaugh fed NEH grant descriptions into OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot, asking it to judge whether each grant was a DEI program. ChatGPT's yes/no responses were entered into a spreadsheet alongside its stated rationale, and that spreadsheet was used to decide which grants to terminate. The process replaced a list of grant candidates generated by career NEH staff with an AI-generated one. NEH Acting Chair MMMichael McDonald, who served from March 2025 to January 2026, yielded his authority over the cancellation process to the DOGE team.\n\nThe ChatGPT search flagged grants containing the words 'LGBTQ,' 'tribal,' 'BIPOC,' 'gay,' 'indigenous,' 'melting pot,' and 'equality,' but did not search for any analogous terms like 'white,' 'heterosexual,' or 'Caucasian.' Plaintiffs' lawyers called this pattern evidence of viewpoint discrimination, violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fifth Amendment."

"Among the grants terminated as DEI violations: a documentary about Jewish women's slave labor during the Holocaust; an anthology translating fiction by Jewish writers reflecting on the Soviet Holocaust; a project on violence against women during the Holocaust; a project to digitize photograph collections of Appalachian residents; an archival project on the lives of Italian Americans; multiple projects to preserve endangered Native American languages and cultures; a project on the 1873 Colfax Massacre and its legacy for Black civil rights; and a biography of Black jurist Oscar Adams Jr.\n\nA grant for a public discussion series titled 'Examining experiences of LGBTQ military service' was flagged and terminated. When asked why, NCNate Cavanaugh answered simply: 'Because it explicitly says LGBTQ.' When asked to define DEI, Fox and Cavanaugh both struggled. Fox refused to define it at all. Cavanaugh's attempts at a definition were inconsistent and shifted during the course of the deposition."

"The depositions were taken in January 2026 as part of a lawsuit filed by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and the Authors Guild in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of 🗽New York. The plaintiffs argue the terminations violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires federal agencies to follow proper rulemaking procedures and make decisions that are not arbitrary and capricious. They also argue the process violated the Equal Protection Clause by discriminating based on viewpoint and identity.\n\nOn March 6, 2026, the plaintiffs filed a motion for summary judgment and released discovery materials including the deposition videos and the ChatGPT spreadsheet. Clips of Fox and Cavanaugh's testimony went viral on social media, drawing millions of views and significant public scrutiny of the DOGE process. ABC News reported that both Fox and Cavanaugh said they had 'no regrets' about the impact on people who lost income when their grants were canceled."

"On March 13, 2026, U.S. District Judge CMColleen McMahon issued an order requiring the plaintiff organizations to 'take any and all possible steps to claw back' the deposition videos from the internet. The Department of Justice had filed an emergency submission arguing the videos were improperly released publicly and claiming that at least one witness, believed to be NCNate Cavanaugh, had received significant harassment and death threats after they went viral.\n\nMcMahon's order did not address the underlying merits of the case. It was a narrow procedural ruling about how discovery materials are handled in litigation. Under standard federal court rules, deposition videos obtained in discovery are not automatically public records; parties must agree or a judge must rule to make them public. The plaintiffs' release of the videos before the judge authorized public disclosure gave the DOJ the legal opening to seek their removal."

"The DOGE small agencies team that Fox and Cavanaugh led also operated at the U.S. Institute for Peace, which Cavanaugh led, and applied similar processes to other small federal agencies. Separately, a whistleblower testified before Congress in March 2026 that a former DOGE worker stole Social Security Administration data on a thumb drive. The NEH case is one of dozens of active lawsuits challenging DOGE's authority to direct agency actions, a question that courts have not yet definitively resolved.\n\nThe constitutional question at the center of many DOGE cases is whether an unofficial advisory body, operating without Senate confirmation and without statutory authority, can direct permanent federal agencies to take official action. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked Elon Musk's deposition in a related USAID case on March 4, ruling 2-1 that the lower court had 'abused its discretion.' The NEH case is proceeding in the Southern District of 🗽New York under a different judge and a different legal record."