Elon Musk’s disciples in his so-called Department of Government Efficiency were embedded across federal agencies with a mandate to fire thousands of public employees and radically cut federal spending.
When Musk deployed DOGE into the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provides vital financial support to research and arts programs, Musk’s staff abruptly choked off more than 1,400 grants, eliminating tens of millions of dollars in public funding within less than a month.
More than 10 hours of newly released video testimony from January uncovers how two DOGE operators relied on ChatGPT and their own largely uninformed judgments to make sweeping decisions about funding for a range of programs and projects — and the people who rely on them.
The depositions, stemming from a lawsuit from the Modern Language Association, the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Historical Association, included testimony from two young DOGE officials, Justin Fox and Nathan Cavanaugh, neither of whom had experience working in government, let alone grant administration.
The only grants they didn’t touch involved events surrounding America’s 250th anniversary and the “National Garden of Heroes” — two Donald Trump priorities.
Evidence in the case exposes DOGE’s “haphazard and unlawful actions” from “unqualified agents” who “undermined the separation of powers and denied the American people access to vital public programming and research,” according to Modern Language Association executive director Paula M. Krebs.
ChatGPT and DEI
During his hours-long deposition, Fox admitted to using ChatGPT to sift through grants before DOGE started slashing.
They used a prompt: “Does the following relate at all to DEI?”
They then asked the generative AI chatbot to “Respond factually in less than 120 characters” and begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation.”
That prompt — included a vast tranche of discovery materials in the lawsuit, along with emails, spreadsheets and text messages — was the “intermediary step” before DOGE scanned through the results, Fox said in his deposition.
When he reviewed a grant for a documentary about Black civil rights, he agreed that the project violated Trump’s executive order on DEI because it “focused on a singular race.”
“It is not for the benefit of humankind,” said Fox, who was an associate at a private equity firm before joining DOGE.
“It is focused on this specific group, or a specific race, here being Black,” he said.
Asked by an attorney why a documentary about Black history would not benefit humankind, he struggled to adjust his answer.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” he said. “The way that I phrased it there wasn’t exactly what I meant.
The project is “focused on a specific subset of race, and therefore it relates to DEI,” he said.
But when it came to what DEI actually is, Fox struggled to answer.
In a painful, minutes-long exchange during his deposition, full of pregnant pauses and heavy sighs, Fox said his “understanding” of DEI was based on Trump’s executive order targeting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across the government.
But “I can’t remember” what was in it, he said.
Asked why a documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust would be considered “DEI,” Fox said: “It’s the gender-based story that’s inherently discriminatory to focus on this specific group.”
And asked what he means by “inherently discriminatory,” he replied: “It’s focusing on DEI principles. Gender being one of them.”
‘There were no books’
When it came to deciding which grants they were culling, they didn’t turn to field experts or consult with anyone who did. Nobody asked the DOGE team to use ChatGPT, but they appeared to have relied on the results.
Cavanaugh admitted he does not have any experience in the scholarly or peer review process.
“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,” Cavanaugh said in his deposition.
Asked by attorneys which books informed those judgments, Cavaugh said he didn’t consult any.
“There were no books,” he said.
Cavanaugh, 28, is the co-founder of Brainbase, which manages intellectual property licensing for brands. He later co-founded a company called Special with Fox, which buys other businesses “in senior care, adopting technology to pay the nurses and caregivers more, so that the aging population has enough nurses to meet the demand,” according to Fox.
Fox compiled what he thought were the “craziest” and “other bad” grants, turning to three dozen keywords, including “LGBTQ.,” “BIPOC,” “Tribal,” “ethnicity,” “gender,” “equality,” “immigration,” “citizenship” and “melting pot.”
More than two dozen grants deemed the “craziest” were related to LGBT+ projects.
In the deposition, Fox said the list reflected his “subjective” judgment.
“‘Crazy’ is one way of saying it,” he said. “‘Most incriminating’ is another way.”
One of the “craziest” grants Cavanaugh reviewed concerned a book that explored the legacy of HIV and AIDS activism and prison abolition.
“It references feminist and queer insights into prison abolition and LGBTQ studies,” he said.
Another proposal for a public series called “Examining experiences of LGBTQ military service” aimed to discuss the experiences of marginalized U.S. service members.
Asked why the project was flagged for termination, Cavanaugh said “Because it explicitly says LGBTQ.”
Six-figure salaries and no remorse
Fox said he earned $150,000 for his work with DOGE, and Cavanaugh received $120,000.
“Sorry for those impacted, but there is a bigger problem, and that’s ultimately — the more important piece is reducing the government spend,” Fox said when asked if he felt any remorse for the grantees.
He said the cuts were a “necessary step in the right direction.”
“Growth in government spending leads to a debt spiral, leads to hyperinflation, leads to every American feeling 10, 12 percent inflation,” he said. “It’s knock-on effects of something that you can address today through non-critical spending cuts, or you can all feel tomorrow.”
Asked by attorneys if he experiences any regret that people may have lost income because of their actions, Cavaugh cut off the question before it was finished.
“No,” he said in his deposition. “I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from $2 trillion to close to zero.”
He admitted they didn’t come close to doing that.
DOGE, which is baked into federal agencies, made 29,000 cuts to the government last year.
But federal spending didn’t go down under DOGE’s watch. It did the opposite. The bulk of DOGE’s work — including devastating cuts to foreign aid recipients — ultimately amounted to very little within the scope of the government spending.
