DOGE Bro’s Grant Review Process Was Literally Just Asking ChatGPT ‘Is This DEI?’

from the the-chatgpt-presidency dept

Federal grants that had been approved after a full application and review process were terminated by some random inexperienced DOGE bros based on whether ChatGPT could explain—in under 120 characters—that they were “related to DEI.”

That’s what the newly released proposed amended complaint from the Authors Guild against the US government reveals about how DOGE actually decided which National Endowment for the Humanities grants to kill.

There were plenty of early reports that the DOGE bros Elon Musk brought into government—operating on the hubristically ignorant belief that they understood how things worked better than actual government employees—were using AI tools to figure out what to cut. Now we have the receipts.

The bros in question here are Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox who appeared all over the place in the early DOGE days, destroying the US government.

Cavanaugh was appointed president of the U.S. Institute of Peace after DOGE took over, though that position is affected by this week’s court ruling. Shortly after being named the acting director of the Interagency Council on Homelessness — one of the agencies Trump’s budget proposal calls for eliminating — Cavanaugh placed its entire staff on administrative leave.

Cavanaugh first emerged at GSA in February, where he met with many technical staffers and software engineers and interviewed them about their jobs, according to four GSA employees who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation.

Since then, he’s also been detailed to multiple other agencies, according to court filings, including the U.S. African Development Foundation (USADF), the Inter-American Foundation (IAF), the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Minority Business Development Agency.

Cavanaugh’s partner in much of the small agency outreach is Justin Fox, who most recently worked as an associate at Nexus Capital Management, according to his LinkedIn profile.

As far as I can tell, Cavanaugh is a college dropout who founded a startup to do IP licensing management, that has gone through some trouble. We’ve mentioned Cavanaugh here before, for the time when he was head of the US Institute for Peace, and Elon and DOGE falsely labeled a guy who had worked for USIP a member of the Taliban, causing the actual Taliban to kidnap the guy’s family. Fox, as noted, was a low rung employee at some random private equity firm. Neither should have any of the jobs listed above, and don’t seem to know shit about anything relevant to a government role.

Anyway, as the Authors Guild figured out in discovery, when these two inexperienced and ignorant DOGE bros were assigned to cut grants in the National Endowment for the Humanities, apparently Fox just started feeding grant titles to ChatGPT asking (in effect) “is this DEI?” From the complaint:

To flag grants for their DEI involvement, Fox entered the following command into ChatGPT: “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.” He then inserted short descriptions of each grant. Fox did nothing to understand ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” as used in the command or to ensure that ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” matched his own.

Cool.

Then, actual staff at the NEH, including experts who might have been able to explain to these two interlopers what the grants actually did and why they were worth supporting, were blocked from challenging the termination of these grants.

Grants identified this way were slated for termination—with only a handful of exceptions, staff at NEH, including the Acting Chair, were not permitted to remove them from the termination list.

It seems to me that two ignorant DOGE bros cancelling humanities grants based solely on “yo is this DEI?” ChatGPT prompts, kinda shows the need for actual diversity, equity, and inclusion in how things like the National Endowment for the Humanities should work. Instead, you have two rando dweebs who don’t understand shit asking the answer machine to justify cancelling grants that sound too woke.

It really feels like these two chucklefucks should be asked to justify their jobs way more than any of these grant recipients should have to justify their work. But, nope, the bros just got to cancelling.

See if you notice a pattern.

For instance, Fox searched each grant’s description for the use of key words that appeared in a “Detection List” that he created. Those key words included terms such as “LGBTQ,” “homosexual,” “tribal,” “immigrants,” “gay,” “BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color),” “native,” and so on. Terms like “white,” “Caucasian,” and “heterosexual” did not appear in the Detection List.

Fox also organized certain grants into a spreadsheet with lists that he labeled “Craziest Grants” and “Other Bad Grants.” Among the grants on those lists were those Fox described as relating to “experiences of LGBTQ military service,” “oral histories of LatinX in the mid-west,” “social and cultural context of tribal linguistics,” and a “book on the ‘first gay black science fiction writer in history.’”

Fox also used the Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) tool ChatGPT to search grant descriptions that purportedly related to DEI, but Fox did not direct the AI tool that it should not identify grants solely on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or similar characteristic. The AI searches broadly captured all grants that referred to individuals based on precisely those characteristics. For example, the AI searches flagged a grant described as concerning “the Colfax massacre, the single greatest incidence of anti-Black violence during Reconstruction,” another concerning “the untold story of Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust,” another that funded a film examining how the game of baseball was “instrumental in healing wounds caused by World War I and the 1980s economic standoff between the US and Japan,” another charting “the rise and reforms of the Native Americans boarding school systems in the U.S. between 1819 and 1934,” and another about “the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), the first female pilots to fly for the U.S. military during WWII” and the “Black female pilots who . . . were denied entry into the WASP because of their race.”

So, yeah. This kid basically fed any grant that might upset a white Christian nationalist into ChatGPT, saying “justify me cancelling this shit for being woke” and then he and his college dropout “IP licensing” buddy cancelled them all.

Cavanaugh worked closely with Fox in selecting which grants to terminate using this selection criteria.

Fox and Cavanaugh sorted grants in lists labeled “to cancel” or “to keep.”

No grant relating to DEI as broadly conceived of by Fox and Cavanaugh appeared on the “to keep” list. Grants that Fox and Cavanaugh considered “wasteful” and thus slated for termination could be moved to the “to keep” list by Defendant McDonald only if they related to “America 250” or the “Garden of Heroes” initiatives based on the views of Defendants McDonald, Fox, Cavanaugh, and NEH staff member, Adam Wolfson

The complaint notes that almost immediately Cavanaugh and Fox sent out mass emails to more than 1,400 grant recipients, from a private non-government email server, telling them their grants had been terminated.

Even though the emails stated that the grant terminations were “signed” by the acting director of NEH, Michael McDonald, he admitted he had nothing to do with them. It was all Fox, Cavanaugh… and ChatGPT based on a very stupid prompt.

McDonald appeared to acknowledge that he did not determine which grants to terminate nor did he draft the termination letters. First, he stated that he had explained NEH’s traditional termination process but that “as they said in the notification letter…they would not be adhering to traditional notification processes” and “they did not feel those should be applied in this instance.” Further, in response to a question about the rationale for grant terminations, he replied that the “rationale was simply because that’s the way DOGE had operated at other agencies and they applied the same methodology here.” McDonald also said that any statement about the number of grants terminated would be “conjecture” on his part, even though he purportedly signed each termination letter

DOGE bros gone wild.

So, just to recap, we have two random DOGE bros with basically no knowledge or experience in the humanities (and at least one of whom is a college dropout), who just went around terminating grants that had gone through a full grant application process by feeding in a list of culture war grievance terms, selecting out the grant titles based on the appearance of seemingly “woke” words, then asking ChatGPT “yo, tell me this is DEI” and then sending termination emails the next day from a private server and forging the director’s signature.

This is what “government efficiency” looks like in practice: two guys with zero relevant experience, a keyword list built on culture war grievances, and a chatbot confidently spitting out 120-character verdicts on federal grants that went through actual review processes. The experts who might have explained what these grants actually do? Locked out. The director whose signature appeared on termination letters? Couldn’t tell you which grants got cut or why.

The cruelty isn’t incidental. But neither is the incompetence. These are people who genuinely believe that being good at vibes-based pattern matching is the same as understanding how institutions work. And the wreckage they leave behind is the entirely predictable result.

Filed Under: chatgpt, dei, humanities, justin fox, nate cavanaugh, neh, woke

Companies: authors guild