ChatGPT Killed $100 Million in Grants

Court depositions expose the chaos and hypocrisy behind the gutting of arts funding

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), originally headed by Elon Musk, assembled its operation in record time. One DOGE staffer, Nathan Cavanaugh, had a background in tech and just one year of college at Indiana University under his belt. “He joined DOGE after three conversations [but no formal interview], went through a day or two of standard onboarding for GSA and got to work,” Government Executive reports. “He didn’t receive any specific training, he said.” Another DOGE staffer, Justin Fox, reportedly landed his role through personal connections, a friend’s dad who worked for Musk. Fox said he didn’t remember whether he’d interviewed for the job — he just got put in touch, and he was in.

Another DOGE staffer, Edward Coristine, whose “age and lack of experience came to symbolize DOGE for many of its critics,” according to NBC News, was only a teenager when he was hired at DOGE, despite the fact that his resume — which must have been brief — included being let go from an internship after it was discovered he had leaked cybersecurity secrets. This band of young techies was to preside over reducing the country’s $2 trillion federal deficit. They were sent out to various government agencies and given unchecked power to lay off federal employees and cut spending.

Still image from video of Justin Fox’s deposition testimony

Now, DOGE is facing a lawsuit over its role in slashing grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in April of last year — grants that amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars, covering everything from cultural preservation projects to basic maintenance at museums. As a part of that lawsuit, video-recorded depositions took place in January of this year, and remarks from Cavanaugh and Fox went viral after being released earlier this month.

In one clip, Cavanaugh is asked, “You don’t regret that people [who relied on those grants] might have lost important incomes?” Cavanaugh responds, “No.” He explains, “I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from $2 trillion to close to zero.” The interviewer then asks, “Did you reduce the federal deficit?” Cavanaugh replies, “No, we didn’t.” (Despite cutting 9% of the federal workforce, DOGE did not reduce spending.)

Fox was asked to define diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) because the NEH grants had been terminated in response to executive orders requiring an end to federal funding for DEI-related projects. He refused to define DEI, claiming that it is “exactly what was written in the EO [executive order].”

Cavanaugh and Fox, both members of DOGE’s Small Agencies Team, were the key decision-makers in the grant terminations despite their lack of any background in the humanities, and there is shock value in their viral clips. But those comments hardly scratch the surface. The rest of the lawsuit’s discovery material was just released to the public, and there is much to be learned from it.

Understanding the lawsuit and the NEH

The lawsuit over the grant cuts is against both DOGE and the NEH. One of the largest funders of humanities research in the country, the NEH is a historically nonpartisan, independent federal organization. In March 2025, DOGE was brought in to hasten steps toward eliminating DEI and ensuring compliance with the Trump administration’s executive orders. On April 1, about 1,400 NEH grants — totaling over $100 million — were canceled after a deliberation period of just a few weeks. The NEH had never before terminated any grants in this manner, at this scale, or for these reasons. In their depositions, leaders at the NEH could recall no more than a few grant cancellations; one longtime staffer said that in his 22 years at the organization, there had been “under half a dozen.”

The lawsuit was filed by a group of organizations seeking to have the terminations reversed and the funding reinstated. They claim that the defunding violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fifth Amendment by specifically targeting grants related to minority groups. They say that because the NEH cut out any congressional role, the grants were “cancelled without statutory authority.” And they allege that NEH and DOGE employees violated the Federal Records Act — which requires federal officials to maintain a record of their decisions for the sake of accountability — by communicating about government business on the app Signal and setting it to delete their messages automatically.

But even without preserving a full record, they left a trail of evidence. As Inside Higher Ed reports, “the trove of [discovery] documents — including depositions with top NEH administrators and DOGE staff, as well as emails, spreadsheets and text messages — suggest rushed, chaotic funding termination decisions and reveal the extent of DOGE’s influence in terminating 97 percent of the agency’s grants.”

DOGE’s takeover of the NEH

The discovery documents paint a picture that centers on Cavanaugh and Fox, along with Michael McDonald, the Trump-appointed acting chair of the NEH at the time. Email records show Cavanaugh and Fox telling McDonald that they were getting pressure directly from the White House to make the cuts.

In his deposition, Cavanaugh admitted that this was a fabrication and called it “a pressure tactic.” But it helped DOGE get the upper hand. McDonald deferred his authority to Cavanaugh and Fox, saying, “As you’ve made clear, it’s your decision on whether to discontinue funding on any of the [grants].”

The DOGE team and experienced NEH employees diverged on certain grants, and when they did, it was DOGE that had the final say. For example, when asked why funding was cut for a documentary about Jewish women forced into slave labor during the Holocaust, Fox said the documentary was “inherently related to DEI” because it focused on marginalized voices and Jewish women specifically. (Despite his reluctance to define what DEI is during the deposition, he was happy to identify DEI-related programs.) McDonald did not agree. The project’s grant was terminated.

In his deposition, McDonald explained why he allowed the DOGE employees to do as they saw fit. “I believe that I had a responsibility [as acting director of the NEH], which, in my view, is part of the executive branch of government. We were given instructions by the President to cooperate with DOGE in its work.” McDonald understood just how unprecedented the cuts were, but he said he supported DOGE in its goal of aligning the NEH with the president’s executive order.

While McDonald yielded to DOGE, the depositions make clear that he wasn’t aware of the measures it was resorting to to get the job done. The executive orders themselves were vague and hardly described DEI; one simply refers to “diversity” and “equity” efforts as illegal, without defining those terms. DOGE staffers were left to fill in the uncertainty with their own understanding.

So they consulted ChatGPT. “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters,” Fox told the chatbot. “Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation.” He plugged in grant descriptions that were just a few sentences and allowed an AI model to make decisions that had consequences in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

Unsurprisingly, the ChatGPT decisions were crude and imprecise. The records show that it wasn’t even told what constitutes DEI. It made elementary errors that weren’t caught, and things that were in no way related to DEI were mistakenly flagged. For example, grants to replace a museum’s HVAC system, digitize a local newspaper, and train individuals who preserve historic documents and archives were all deemed DEI — flagged because they would increase “inclusion” or “access” to the humanities.

But while those mistakes reveal carelessness, what is more concerning are the cuts that were not made in error. The standard seems to have been that any cultural preservation project related to people who are nonwhite, LGBTQ, or women could not be funded.

What DOGE says, goes

The DOGE staff used a very broad brush in identifying what they considered DEI. Grants on preserving the history of the Civil War, the works of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Native American languages were canceled. Grants related to Alfred North Whitehead, Martin Van Buren, and Ernest Hemingway — white men — were in the clear.

With no relevant experience, DOGE flagged anything with terms such as “BIPOC,” “tribal,” and “LGBTQ” as DEI rather than individually analyzing the grants. A plaintiff motion for summary judgment reads, “Fox’s initial search was a facially race-, ethnicity-, and sexuality-based screen — grants touching on the experiences of racial minorities, Indigenous peoples, or LGBTQ communities were flagged.” (The motion is still pending.)

ChatGPT marked a biography of Oscar Adams Jr. as DEI because it “explores the life and accomplishments of… a Black lawyer and jurist.” A project translating works from the Holocaust into English was deemed DEI because “this anthology explores Jewish writers’ engagement with the Holocaust.”

Sarah Weickse, executive director of the American Historical Association, one of the plaintiffs in the case, remarked, “Terminating the grants of scholars and institutions” due to “the race or [social identity] of the historical figures they intended to study… threatens the study of history and the humanities more broadly.”

In his deposition, McDonald admitted that he disagreed with multiple grant terminations. He said he believed they were not in violation of the executive order and should not have been flagged as DEI and canceled. He had sent an email to DOGE employees saying as much, writing that NEH staff made a careful review of all grants and assessed their relation to DEI, “rat[ing] them high, medium or low in terms of promoting DEI.” But when DOGE came in with their list, McDonald expressed concern that they planned to cut “products that seemed to have no applicability to promoting DEI.”

Still image from video of deposition testimony by Michael McDonald, acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities

The DOGE employees were less cautious. In his deposition, Cavanaugh said that identifying DEI, and therefore knowing what grants to cut, is simple and intuitive — and when it wasn’t, he explained, “we [would] lean on the side of cutting it because DOGE’s mission was to reduce federal spending. We erred on the side of the cut versus keep, generally.”

The DOGE employees say they deliberately put the NEH under intense time pressure to provide recommendations on funding decisions. In practice, this meant cutting corners. After the NEH agreed to bend the knee and scrap their carefully considered first set of recommendations, McDonald, in an email to Fox, wrote, “In the interest of time, because we know you want to move quickly, we didn’t give these applications the individualized consideration that we did [the first time around].” This time, they gave careful treatment to just a select few grants. “We only explicitly initialed a few important projects — such as the papers of George Washington — whose cancellation would not reflect well on any of us,” the email read.

DOGE’s hypocrisy

The obvious irony is that DOGE was slashing DEI programs for their alleged injustice and unfairness, and yet the means through which they did so were neither just nor fair.

Critics of DEI often say that it wrongly treats people differently based on racial categories. Yet this is exactly what DOGE did in its funding decisions: objective academic value was not assessed, and grants were cut only because they happened to relate to minority groups.

DEI critics express concern that DEI affords opportunities to people who aren’t qualified, yet the DOGE staffers were primary examples of just that. “Neither Fox nor Cavanaugh had any relevant background in the humanities, public or private grant administration, peer review, or government service of any kind prior to joining the Administration,” reads the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment.

DEI critics insist on the importance of merit-based decisions, yet some DOGE staffers came into their positions through personal connections and without relevant experience.

And in the end it was mostly for nothing. The NEH was gutted. Careers were ended or hindered, and valuable research will not be done. Meanwhile, the budget deficit continues to trend upward. Cavanaugh said in his deposition that he saw his job as slashing “useless agencies.” Perhaps he should have begun with DOGE’s Small Agencies Team.