How Two DOGE Staffers Used ChatGPT to Gut $100 Million in Humanities Grants — and Couldn't Define Why

In April 2025, the National Endowment for the Humanities — a federal agency that had operated continuously since 1965, funding everything from Ken Burns documentaries to local library programs — lost 97% of its active grants and 65% of its staff in a 22-day blitz. The architects of this demolition were not senior policy officials or subject-matter experts. They were two young men: Justin Fox, a former investment banker, and Nathan Cavanaugh, a 28-year-old college dropout and tech entrepreneur. Their primary tool was not scholarship, peer review, or legal analysis. It was ChatGPT [1][2].

Sworn depositions taken in January 2026 and released publicly in March as part of a federal lawsuit have laid bare the internal mechanics of how the Department of Government Efficiency dismantled one of the country's oldest cultural institutions — and the revelations have been equal parts alarming and absurd.

The 120-Character Verdict

The process, according to discovery materials released by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the American Historical Association (AHA), and the Modern Language Association (MLA), worked like this: Fox submitted the descriptions of 1,162 active NEH grants into OpenAI's ChatGPT with a single prompt [3]:

"Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with 'Yes.' or 'No.' followed by a brief explanation. Do not use 'this initiative' or 'this description' in your response."

ChatGPT's responses were entered into a spreadsheet alongside each grant's details, with columns for "DEI rationale" and "Yes / No DEI?" This spreadsheet replaced the list that NEH's own career staff had compiled. The AI-generated verdicts — each capped at the length of a tweet — became the basis for canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in congressionally appropriated funds [3][4].

Fox did not provide ChatGPT with any definition of DEI. He did not instruct the model to avoid discriminating on the basis of race, sex, religion, or other protected categories. He took ChatGPT's conclusions at face value, never questioning its rationale, which in most cases simply noted that a grant description mentioned a particular race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation [3][5].

"Craziest Grants" and "Other Bad Grants"

Before running the full database through ChatGPT, Fox had created his own classification system. He compiled what he called a "Detection List" of identity-based traits, organizing flagged grants into categories labeled "Craziest Grants" and "Other Bad Grants" [6]. He searched for terms including "Black," "homosexual," "BIPOC," "indigenous," "tribal," "melting pot," and "equality" — but notably did not search for "white" or "caucasian" [6][7].

The asymmetry was not lost on the attorneys deposing him, nor on the public when clips of the depositions went viral.

The Collateral Damage

The grants swept up in this process bore little resemblance to any coherent definition of ideological overreach. Among the projects terminated [3][4][8]:

• A documentary sharing the story of Jewish women's slave labor during the Holocaust
• An anthology translating fiction by Jewish writers reflecting on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union
• A grant supporting the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill University
• An archival project documenting the lives of Italian Americans
• A project to digitize photograph collections of Appalachian residents
• Multiple projects to preserve endangered Native American languages and cultures
• A $349,000 HVAC replacement at North Carolina's High Point Museum — a pure infrastructure grant with no programmatic content whatsoever
• Three forthcoming American Masters documentary films
• A docuseries examining the American criminal justice system

NEH career staff reviewed the DOGE-generated list and flagged numerous grants that had no connection to DEI by any definition — projects involving collections management, preservation training, and building maintenance. Their objections were overridden. Internal communications showed that the acting NEH chair, Michael McDonald, had ceded decision-making authority to DOGE, writing: "as you've made clear, it's your decision on whether to discontinue funding any of the projects on this list" [3].

Source: GDELT Project

Data as of Mar 15, 2026CSV

"There Were No Books"

The depositions of Fox and Cavanaugh, recorded under oath in January 2026, provided the most granular public account yet of how DOGE operated inside a federal agency.

Over the course of a six-hour deposition, Fox repeatedly refused to define what he believed "DEI" meant — the very concept he had been tasked with identifying and eliminating across the NEH's entire grant portfolio [6][7]. When asked whether a grant focused on the Holocaust constituted DEI, his answers were halting and evasive. At one point, he described a terminated grant as "not for the benefit of humankind" before walking the claim back [6].

Cavanaugh, who co-led the NEH operation alongside Fox, was similarly unable to articulate the standards he had applied. When pressed on what informed his judgment calls about which grants constituted DEI, he offered a philosophical defense: "I think a person can have enough judgment from reading books and being well-informed outside of traditional experience to make judgment calls about obvious things like a grant that literally lists DEI in its description" [1][2].

When attorneys asked which books he had relied on, his answer was blunt: "There were no books" [2].

Neither Fox nor Cavanaugh had any experience in scholarly peer review, humanities research, or federal grant administration. Cavanaugh, who dropped out of Indiana University at 19 to co-found an intellectual property licensing startup called Brainbase, was being paid over $120,500 annually — equivalent to a federal worker with 13 years of experience [9]. Fox was a former associate at Nexus Capital Management [6].

Asked if he regretted that people might have lost important income when their grants were terminated, Cavanaugh said no. "I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from $2 trillion to close to zero," he told the attorneys [1][10]. (The federal deficit has not, in fact, been reduced to close to zero.)

The Videos Go Viral — Then Disappear

The academic organizations that deposed Fox and Cavanaugh posted the full video depositions to YouTube in early March 2026. Clips spread rapidly across social media, with Fox's stammering attempts to define DEI attracting particular ridicule [7][11].

The government responded with an emergency filing on March 13, arguing that the videos had led to harassment and death threats against the witnesses. Judge Colleen McMahon of the Federal District Court in Manhattan ordered the plaintiffs to "take any and all possible steps to claw back" the footage. When the academic groups asked her to reconsider, her response was terse: "DENIED. See you Tuesday" [11][12].

The order raised immediate First Amendment concerns among press freedom advocates, who noted that sworn testimony in a federal lawsuit is typically a matter of public record. By the time the videos were removed, however, they had already been downloaded, clipped, and reshared millions of times.

The Legal Battle

The lawsuit — ACLS, AHA, and MLA v. NEH — was originally filed in May 2025 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The court previously entered a preliminary injunction against the government, ruling that the grant terminations violated both the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act [5][13].

On March 6, 2026, the plaintiffs filed a motion for summary judgment seeking to restore the NEH's previous function and funding. Their legal claims rest on three pillars [3][5][13]:

First Amendment viewpoint discrimination: The plaintiffs argue that DOGE targeted grants based on their perceived political viewpoints and associations, a form of content-based censorship that courts have consistently held unconstitutional — even when the government is distributing funds rather than regulating speech.

Equal Protection violations: By flagging grants solely because their descriptions included terms like "LGBTQ," "Tribal," "BIPOC," and "homosexual," DOGE staffers classified grants on the basis of race, sex, national origin, and sexual orientation — categories that trigger heightened constitutional scrutiny under the Fifth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.

Separation of powers: DOGE personnel, not the NEH Chair, made the actual termination decisions, and they did so without congressional authorization. The NEH was established by an act of Congress, and its appropriations were voted on by both chambers — funds that DOGE unilaterally zeroed out.

The Authors Guild filed a separate brief detailing DOGE's role in what it called "unlawful NEH terminations," adding to a growing coalition of scholarly and creative organizations challenging the cuts [5].

Signal Messages and the Federal Records Act

Discovery also revealed that NEH staff communicated about the grant termination process using Signal, the encrypted messaging app, with messages set to auto-delete [3]. Legal experts noted that this practice likely violates the Federal Records Act, which requires the preservation of records documenting federal agency decisions. The use of ephemeral messaging to coordinate the elimination of hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding raised additional questions about transparency and accountability.

The $10.4 Million Exception

In a detail that critics have called the clearest evidence of viewpoint discrimination, the gutted NEH subsequently awarded a $10.4 million grant — the largest single award in the agency's 60-year history — to the Tikvah Fund, a conservative think tank and educational organization [14][15]. The grant, announced in September 2025, was for a three-year project to combat antisemitism.

The award was not competitive. Discovery documents showed that McDonald personally asked an NEH staff member to solicit Tikvah's application for a "single-source award" [3][14]. This came months after DOGE had terminated grants to multiple Jewish studies scholars and institutions — including Holocaust research and Yiddish language preservation — on the grounds that they constituted "DEI."

The juxtaposition was stark: an agency that used an AI chatbot to cancel grants mentioning Jewish subjects as impermissible DEI then hand-selected a single organization for the largest award it had ever made — bypassing the peer review process that had governed NEH funding decisions for six decades.

The Broader Pattern

The NEH episode is part of a much larger campaign. Across all federal agencies, DOGE has terminated nearly 16,000 grants totaling approximately $49 billion [16]. The National Science Foundation lost $1 billion in already-awarded grants. AmeriCorps saw nearly $400 million in active grants slashed. TRIO educational programs had $660 million withheld, affecting first-generation college students [16].

But the NEH case has attracted disproportionate attention because the depositions laid bare, under oath and on camera, the intellectual poverty of the process. Two staffers with no relevant expertise used an AI chatbot — without guardrails, without definitions, without expert consultation — to make irreversible decisions about which American cultural and scholarly endeavors deserved public support.

The case also exposes a fundamental tension in the Trump administration's anti-DEI campaign: the term itself has never been officially defined. Executive orders targeting DEI have swept broadly, and the people tasked with enforcement — as Fox's deposition made painfully clear — often cannot articulate what they are looking for. When the filter is a keyword search powered by a large language model with no instructions beyond "does this relate at all to DEI?", the net catches everything from Holocaust scholarship to building ventilation systems.

What Happens Next

The motion for summary judgment is now pending before Judge McMahon. If granted, it could restore the NEH's previous function and mandate the reinstatement of terminated grants. The government has argued that the executive branch has broad authority to align federal spending with presidential priorities, and that the anti-DEI executive orders give agencies lawful grounds to terminate grants.

A hearing on the matter is scheduled for later in March 2026. The outcome will have implications far beyond the humanities — it will help determine whether AI-assisted, keyword-driven reviews of federal grants can survive constitutional scrutiny, and whether political appointees without subject-matter expertise can override congressionally appropriated funding on the basis of a chatbot's 120-character verdict.

Source: Granted AI / CBPP / News Reports

Data as of Mar 15, 2026CSV