DOGE Staff Used ChatGPT to Cancel $100 Million in Grants

Former staffers of the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) testified that they used OpenAI's ChatGPT to identify and cancel more than $100 million in federal grants. Justin Fox and Nathan Cavanaugh, who lacked prior government or humanities experience, scanned grant descriptions from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for keywords such as LGBTQ, BIPOC, and gender fluidity to align with President Donald Trump's anti-DEI directives.

The process targeted over 1,400 active grants—approximately 97% of the agency's active portfolio—including projects documenting the Holocaust, Black civil rights, and LGBTQ military service. Fox admitted to using blunt AI prompts to flag projects as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) related without using a formal definition of the term. During depositions, Fox characterized a documentary about Holocaust survivors as a "gender-based story" that was "inherently discriminatory."

While the staffers defended the cuts as an effort to identify "wasteful spend" and reduce the federal deficit, Cavanaugh admitted during testimony that the actions did not actually reduce the deficit. Some of the diverted funds were redirected to the National Garden of American Heroes. These revelations emerged from a lawsuit filed by the Modern Language Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Historical Association, which allege the terminations violated the Fifth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. A federal judge recently ordered the removal of deposition videos from YouTube following government claims of harassment against Fox.