Former DOGE staffers testify in NEH grant lawsuit
April 3, 2026
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5:00Now PlayingFormer DOGE staffers testify in NEH grant lawsuit
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as posted by the channelA federal judge has ruled that deposition videos of two former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffers can remain online, rejecting claims that potential embarrassment outweighed public interest in the case. The former DOGE employees, Justin Fox and Nathan Cavanaugh, testified that they used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to identify grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) they believed violated President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting “radical and wasteful” diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Determinations of which grants to cut were made by feeding short summaries of projects into ChatGPT and asking the chatbot if there was any connection to DEI, according to discovery materials released by the American Historical Association in March as part of a lawsuit against the NEH. The DOGE employees appeared to rely on the technology to compile a list of 1,477 grants to terminate, nearly every active award made during the Biden administration. The cuts clawed back more than $100 million, nearly half the federal agency’s budget, throwing organizations into turmoil and forcing some projects to shut down.
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