Turns Out The DOGE Bros Who Killed Humanities Grants Are Kinda Sensitive About It

from the merit-based-hiring? dept

Much of last week I had been working on a different article than the one this became. The American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and the American Council of Learned Societies — all plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the National Endowment for the Humanities over DOGE’s mass grant cancellations — had uploaded the full video depositions of four government witnesses to YouTube. I had been watching through the many hours of those videos, planning to write specifically about what former DOGE operatives Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh actually said under oath about how they decided which grants to kill.

I had already written about what the legal filings revealed back in February, well before the NY Times published its own deep dive into the depositions last week. But the videos added something the transcripts couldn’t fully capture: the demeanor of two young guys with zero government experience who were handed the power to destroy hundreds of millions of dollars in already-approved humanities grants, and who were now forced to sit there, on camera, and attempt (weakly) to explain themselves. Before I could publish my piece, 404 Media’s Joseph Cox covered some of what was found in the depositions and illustrated it with these thumbnails of Fox straight from YouTube that certainly… tell a story.

And then, of course, the government got the videos taken down. Because these alpha disruptors who thought they were saving America by nuking grants for Holocaust documentaries and Black civil rights research turned out to be too fragile to withstand a little internet mockery for their dipshittery.

We’ll get to that part. But first, let’s talk about what made the depositions so devastating, and why the government was so desperate to hide them.

As we covered in February, the actual “process” by which Fox and Cavanaugh decided to terminate nearly every active NEH grant from the Biden administration was, to put it charitably, not a process at all. Fox fed short grant descriptions into ChatGPT with a prompt that read:

“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.”

That was it. A chatbot verdict in fewer characters than a tweet. As Cox reported after watching all six-plus hours of Fox’s deposition, nobody told Fox to use an LLM for this. He did it on his own. He called it an “intermediary step” — a fancy way of saying he asked the magic answer box to justify what he’d already decided to do.

The depositions revealed the ChatGPT prompt raising flags that would be comedic if the grants hadn’t actually been terminated. As the NY Times reported:

Building improvements at an Indigenous languages archive in Alaska risked “promoting inclusion and diverse perspectives.” Renewal of a longstanding grant to digitize Black newspapers and add them to a historical database was “D.E.I.” So was work on a 40-volume scholarly series on the history of American music.

A documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust? The focus on gender risked “contributing to D.E.I. by amplifying marginalized voices.”

Even an effort to catalog and digitize the papers of Thomas Gage, a British general in the American Revolution, was guilty of “promoting inclusivity and diversity in historical research.”

The Thomas Gage one is really something. The British general who oversaw the colonial crackdown that helped trigger the American Revolution is apparently too “diverse” for Trump’s “America First” humanities agenda. George Washington’s papers got spared, but the papers of the guy Washington fought against? DEI.

A sizable portion of the deposition was spent trying to get Fox to define DEI. He couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. He repeatedly deferred to the text of Trump’s executive order on DEI, while also admitting he couldn’t recall what it actually said.

How do you interpret DEI?

Fox: [sighs and then a very long pause] There was the EO explicitly laid out the details. I don’t remember it off the top of my head.

It’s okay. I’m asking for your understanding of it.

Fox: Yeah, my understanding was exactly what was written in the EO.

Okay, so can you…

Fox: I don’t remember what was in the EO.

So right now do you have an understanding of what DEI is?

Fox: Yeah.

Okay, so what’s your understanding as you sit here today in this deposition?

Fox: Um, well, it it was exactly what was written in the EO. And so anytime that we would look at a grant through the lens of complying with an executive order, we would just refer back to the EO and assess if this grant had relation to it.

Okay. But I guess I’m stepping back from your uh methodology strictly in terminating the grants. Do you have an understanding as you sit here today of what DEI means?

Fox: Yeah.

Okay. So what’s your understanding of what it means?

Fox: Well, I [scoffs] it is it is is exactly what was written in the EO. And I don’t have the EO in front of me, but that was we would always reference back to the EO and make sure that this grant was in compliance with the EO.

I understand that. Okay, but I’m not asking necessarily about what was in the EO. I’m asking very specifically about your present understanding of what… of DEI? Do you have a present understanding of DEI?

Fox: Yeah!

Okay. Can you explain what that present understanding is?

Fox: Um well, it It’s just easier for me to be referencing back to the EO.

Are you refusing to answer the question?

Fox: I’m not refusing to answer the question. I just feel that referencing back to the verbatim executive order was the best way for us to capture all of the DEI language. And so, I think giving a a high-level overview of what I could relay as DEI is not going to do justice what was written in the EO.

And that’s okay. We can look at the EO as well.

Fox: Great.

I’m asking you for I mean this is a deposition. I’m asking you questions. You’re under oath to answer them. So what what is your understanding of what DEI means?

Fox: Well, I I think I would say again that I I would go back to the EO to make sure I’m capturing enough. I don’t I don’t feel comfortable saying a high level overview because it is such a big bucket and there’s just a lot of pieces of the puzzle.

What’s a part of the bucket?

Fox: Um gender fluidity um sort of promoting um like promoting subsets of LGBTQ+ that um might um alienate another part of the community. Um. Again, it was just easier for us to reference back into the EO.

Okay, so …

Fox: And I don’t want to give you a broad overview because it’s at the end of the day it it is capturing… it is all encompassing in the EO. It’s how we it’s how we did our methodology.

Right. Do you always refer to EOs to gain an understanding of words used in your typical daily vernacular?

Fox: What do you mean?

You you say that you have an understanding what DEI means and when I ask you you say you need to reference the EO. Do you need to reference EOs to define every word you use in your everyday life?

Fox: No.

Okay. So, what’s stopping you from defining DEI to your understanding as you sit here today? On January 28th, 2026.

Fox: It wouldn’t be capturing enough of how big the topic is. DEI is a very broad structure. I’m giving giving my limited recall of what’s included is just not…

But his understanding leaked through anyway when specific grants came up.

Take the grant for a documentary about the 1873 Colfax massacre, where dozens of Black men were murdered by former Confederates and Klan members. ChatGPT flagged it as DEI. Fox agreed. Here’s how he explained it during the deposition. The lawyer reads aloud ChatGPT’s output and questions Fox about it:

“The documentary tells the story of the Colfax Massacre, the single greatest incident of anti-black violence during Reconstruction. And it’s historical and leg NAACP for black civil rights, Louisiana, the South, and in the nation as a whole.” Did I read that correctly?

Fox: Yes. Okay.

And then in column B right next to that, it says, “Yes, the documentary explores a historical event that significantly impacted black civil rights, making it relevant to the topic of DEI.” Did I read that correctly?

Fox: Yes.

Is it fair to say that what I just read is the ChatGPT output of the prompts in the first column?

Fox: Yes.

Okay. Do you agree with ChatGPT’s assessment here that a documentary is DEI if it explores historical events that significantly impacted black civil rights?

Fox:Yes.

Okay. Why would that be DEI?

Fox: It’s focused on a singular race. It is not for the benefit… It is not for the benefit of humankind. It is focused on a specific group of or a specific race here being black.

Why would learning about anti-black violence not be to the benefit of humankind.

Fox: That’s not what I’m saying.

Okay, then what are you saying?

Fox: I’m saying it relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

You said it’s not to the benefit of humankind. Right?

Fox: Is that what I said?

[Laughs] Yeah.

Then there was the documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust:

The grant description of column row 252 says, “Production of My Underground Mother, a feature-length documentary that explores the untold story of Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust through a daughter’s search for her late mother’s past, a collective camp diary in which she wrote and interviews with dozens of women survivors who reveal the gender-based violence they suffered and hit from their own families.” Did I read that correctly?

Fox: Yes.

Okay. And then in that row or column, you say “Yes DEI.” Did you write the rationale in that column?

Fox: Could you scroll over, Jacob?

Again, the rationale says, “The documentary addresses gender-based violence and overlooked histories contributing to DEI by amplifying marginalized voices.”

Fox: Yes.

Why is a documentary about Holocaust survivors DEI?

Fox: It’s the… gender-based… story… that’s inherently discriminatory to focus on this specific group.

It’s inherently discriminatory to focus on what specific group?

Fox: The gender-based so females… during the Holocaust.

And you believe that that’s inherently discriminatory?

Fox: I’m just saying that’s what it’s focused on.

Sure.

Fox: And this is related to the DEI.

Right. But you just use the term inherently discriminatory. What did you mean by that?

Fox: It’s focusing on DEI principles, gender being one of them.

So a documentary that’s about women would be DEI. Is that fair to say?

Fox: No.

Okay. So, tell me why what I just said isn’t DEI, but what you just said is DEI.

Fox: It’s a Jewish specifically focused on Jewish cultures and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture. It’s inherently related to DEI for those reasons.

Because it’s about Jewish culture?

Fox: Plus marginalized female voices during the Holocaust gender-based violence.

Okay. Is this… when we focus on a minority, is that your understanding that, you know, the Jewish people fall into the category of a minority?

Fox: Certainly a culture that could be described as minorities.

Okay. So, how did you go about determining what was a minority and what wasn’t a minority for the for the purpose of identifying DEI in grants?

Fox: Inherently focused on any ethnicity, culture, gender, no matter the sort of race or gender or or religion or… yeah.

So a documentary about anti-Black violence during Reconstruction is “not for the benefit of humankind.” A documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust is “inherently DEI” because it’s focused on “gender” or “religion.” But remember, the keyword list Fox built to scan grants included terms like “LGBTQ,” “homosexual,” “tribal,” “BIPOC,” “native,” and “immigrants.” Notably absent: “white,” “Caucasian,” or “heterosexual.” When pressed on this, Fox offered the defense that he “very well could have” included those terms but just… didn’t.

Now, about Nate Cavanaugh. If you haven’t heard of Cavanaugh, he’s the college dropout who co-founded an IP licensing startup, partnered with Fox on the DOGE work at NEH, and was subsequently appointed — I am not making this up — president of the U.S. Institute of Peace and acting director of the Interagency Council on Homelessness, among other roles. When asked about DEI in his own deposition, Cavanaugh provided what might be the most inadvertently self-aware definition imaginable. While obnoxiously chewing gum during the deposition, the following exchange took place:

What is DEI referring to here?

Cavanaugh: It stands for diversity, equity and inclusion.

And what is your opinion of diversity, equity, inclusion.

Cavanaugh: My personal opinion?

Well, let’s start with what does it mean to you?

Cavanaugh: It means diversity, equity, inclusion.

Well, that’s the label, but what does what do those words mean?

Cavanaugh: It means uh it means making decisions on a basis of something other than merit.

Irony alert: Nate Cavanaugh — a college dropout with no government experience, no background in the humanities, and no apparent understanding of the grants he was terminating — defined DEI as “decisions on the basis of something other than merit.” He said this while sitting in a deposition about his time holding multiple senior government positions for which he had no qualifications whatsoever. The lack of self-awareness is genuinely staggering.

And what did all of this actually accomplish? By Cavanaugh’s own admission, the deficit didn’t go down. Fox was asked about this too. From 404 Media:

When the attorney then asks if Fox would be surprised to hear if the overall deficit did not go down after DOGE’s actions, Fox says no. In his own deposition, Cavanaugh acknowledged the deficit did not go down.

“I have to believe that the dollars that were saved went to mission critical, non-wasteful spending, and so, again, in the broad macro: an unfortunate circumstance for an individual, but this is an effort for the administration,” Fox says. “In my opinion, what is certainly not wasteful is food stamps, healthcare, Medicare, Medicaid funding,” Fox says. Later he adds when discussing a specific cut grant: “those dollars could be getting put to something like food stamps or Medicaid for grandma in a rural county.”

There is no evidence these funds were directed in that way. The Trump administration has kicked millions of people off of food stamps. It has, just as an example, given ICE tens of billions of more dollars, though.

Sure, kiddo. It was all for grandma’s food stamps. (Though given Fox’s ideological priors, one suspects that food stamps themselves would end up on the ‘wasteful spending’ list soon enough.)

The NY Times piece also revealed some remarkable details about how the process played out internally. Acting NEH Chairman Michael McDonald, who had been at the agency for over two decades and could recall fewer than a half-dozen grant revocations in that entire time — all for failure to complete promised work — went along with the mass cancellation of nearly every active Biden-era grant. When DOGE’s process wasn’t moving fast enough, Fox emailed McDonald:

We’re getting pressure from the top on this and we’d prefer that you remain on our side but let us know if you’re no longer interested.

McDonald expressed some reservations, calling many of the grants slated for termination “harmless when it comes to promoting DEI.” But he rolled over:

“But you have also told us that in addition to canceling projects because they may promote DEI ideology, the DOGE Team also wishes to cancel funding to assist deficit reduction. Either way, as you’ve made clear, it’s your decision on whether to discontinue funding any of the projects on this list.”

Out of all grants approved during the Biden administration, only 42 were kept. The rest — 1,477 grants — were terminated. No appeals were allowed. Termination letters bore McDonald’s signature but were sent from an unofficial email address the DOGE employees created. McDonald himself admitted he didn’t draft the letters and couldn’t tell you how many grants were cut. And when pressed on whether the grants concerning the Colfax Massacre and the Holocaust were actually DEI, McDonald — who, unlike Fox and Cavanaugh, actually has a doctorate in literature — said he didn’t agree they were. But he signed off on their termination anyway.

Oh, and McDonald apparently didn’t even know Fox and Cavanaugh had used ChatGPT to make the determinations.

So that’s the substance. Two unqualified guys, a chatbot, a keyword list built on culture war grievances, and the destruction of a century-old institution’s grant portfolio in about two weeks. We covered the mechanics in February. The depositions just put it all on video, in their own words, in all its arrogant, ignorant glory.

And then the government decided it couldn’t handle the public seeing it.

After the plaintiff organizations uploaded the deposition videos to YouTube and shared materials with the press, the government filed an urgent letter asking the court to order the videos removed “from the internet” — yes, they actually used that phrasing — and to restrict the plaintiffs from further publicizing discovery materials. Their argument was that the videos “could subject the witnesses and their family members to undue harassment and reputational harm.”

A few days later, the government came back even more agitated, reporting that Fox had received death threats and that the videos had circulated widely, with “well over 100,000 X posts circulating and/or discussing video clips” of the depositions. The filing cited media coverage from People, HuffPost, 404 Media, and The Advocate.

“Unfortunately, that risk has now materialized—at least one witness has been subjected to significant harassment, including death threats. Accordingly, we respectfully request that the Court enter the requested order as soon as possible to minimize the risk of additional harm to the witnesses and their families.”

Death threats are genuinely bad and nobody should send them. Full stop. That said, let’s explore the breathtaking asymmetry for a moment.

Fox and Cavanaugh subjected more than 1,400 grant recipients to termination with no warning, no due process, no appeal, and effectively forged the director’s signature on the letters. They didn’t give an ounce of thought to the livelihoods they were destroying — the researchers mid-project, the documentary filmmakers, the archivists, the teachers, the organizations that had planned years of work around these grants. When asked if he felt any remorse, Fox said:

Sorry for those impacted, but there is a bigger problem, and that’s ultimately—the more important piece is reducing the government spend.

But now that people are being mean to them on the internet? Now, suddenly, the government needs an emergency protective order and the videos must be scrubbed from existence.

Judge Colleen McMahon did initially order the plaintiffs to “immediately take any and all possible steps to claw back the videos,” pending further briefing. The plaintiffs responded with an emergency motion pointing out a fairly important detail: the government never designated the deposition videos as confidential under the existing protective order. They had the opportunity to do so and didn’t. From the plaintiffs’ filing:

Defendants never designated the video depositions in question as Confidential under the Protective Order, and Defendants have never alleged in their correspondence with ACLS Plaintiffs that ACLS Plaintiffs violated the protective order presently in place.

In other words, the government had a mechanism to keep the videos under wraps. They chose not to use it. And now they want the court to do retroactively what they failed to do at the time.

The judge’s response to the emergency motion was delightfully terse:

DENIED.

See you Tuesday.

And then there’s the part where the government’s own filing accidentally makes the case for why these videos are important. In arguing that the plaintiffs were acting improperly, the government noted that the MLA’s website had links to the deposition videos alongside a link soliciting donations to its advocacy initiative:

Directly below these materials is a link soliciting monetary donations to the MLA’s advocacy initiative “Paving the Way.” To the extent the MLA or other ACLS Plaintiffs are publicizing these documents as part of their fundraising efforts, that is improper.

Which is an interesting argument to make when the entire lawsuit exists because DOGE used ChatGPT to destroy a hundred million dollars in humanities funding.

Now, finally, about those videos the government wanted removed “from the internet.” As anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes studying the history of online content suppression could have predicted, the attempt to get the videos taken down had precisely the opposite of its intended effect. The videos were backed up almost immediately to the Internet Archive, distributed as a torrent, and spread across social media. As 404 Media reported:

The news shows the difficulty in trying to remove material from the internet, especially that which has a high public interest and has already been viewed likely millions of times. It’s also an example of the “Streisand Effect,” a phenomenon where trying to suppress information often results in the information spreading further.

We’ve written about the Streisand Effect many, many times over the years here at Techdirt, and the pattern is always the same: someone sees something embarrassing about themselves online, panics, tries to make it go away, and in doing so ensures that orders of magnitude more people see it than ever would have otherwise. The government’s frantic filings, complete with citations to specific media articles and X post counts, served as a helpful reading list for anyone who hadn’t yet seen the videos.

The judge’s order, notably, only directed the plaintiffs to take down the videos. It said nothing about the Internet Archive, the torrent, the clips on X, the embeds in news articles, or the countless other copies that had already proliferated. And, really, given that none of the other sources are parties to the case, and the associated First Amendment concerns, it’s difficult to see those videos going away any time soon.

The government wanted the videos removed “from the internet.” They have now been seeded to the internet in a format specifically designed to be impossible to remove.

This is what happens when you try to suppress something the public has already decided it wants to see.

And that gets to the broader absurdity here. Fox and Cavanaugh walked into a federal agency they knew nothing about, used a chatbot to condemn more than a thousand grants they never read, created spreadsheets labeled “Craziest Grants” and “Other Bad Grants,” planned to highlight them on DOGE’s X account for culture war clout, sent termination letters with someone else’s signature from a private email server, and explicitly told the agency head that no appeals would be allowed.

When asked under oath to justify what they did, Fox couldn’t define DEI, couldn’t explain why documenting anti-Black violence isn’t “for the benefit of humankind,” and could only offer that the money they saved was probably going to food stamps for grandma — which it very much was not. Cavanaugh couldn’t define DEI either, acknowledged the deficit didn’t go down, and gave a definition of DEI that perfectly described his own role in the federal government.

These are the people who DOGE sent to reshape the government. And now that government is asking a federal judge for an emergency protective order because the internet is being kinda mean about it. Poor poor snowflake DOGE boys.

As the ACLS president put it, “DOGE employees’ use of ChatGPT to identify ‘wasteful’ grants is perhaps the biggest advertisement for the need for humanities education, which builds skills in critical thinking.”

She’s right. Though I’d argue watching these depositions is — unlike Fox’s ridiculously bigoted definition of Black history — very much for the benefit of humankind.

Filed Under: chatgpt, dei, depositions, doge, grants, justin fox, nate cavanaugh, neh, streisand effect

Companies: american council of learned societies, american historical association, authors guild, modern language association