When the Trump administration went looking last spring for National Endowment for the Humanities grants to cut, it turned to a familiar scourge of professors: ChatGPT.
Last March, two employees from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency arrived at the agency with the mandate of canceling previously approved grants that ran afoul of President Donald Trump’s agenda. But instead of looking closely at funded projects, they pulled short summaries off the internet and fed them into the artificial intelligence chatbot.
The prompt was simple: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’” The results were sweeping, and sometimes bizarre.
Building improvements at an Indigenous languages archive in Alaska risked “promoting inclusion and diverse perspectives.” Renewal of a long-standing grant to digitize Black newspapers and add them to a historical database was “DEI.” 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 DEI 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 DOGE employees did not appear to question ChatGPT’s judgments, and continued hunting for unacceptable projects. Two weeks later, they sent a master list of 1,477 problematic awards — nearly every active grant made during the Biden administration — to Michael McDonald, the endowment’s acting chair.
McDonald, a veteran of the agency, agreed to let DOGE terminate them, creating what he later described as a “clean slate” for Trump’s “America First” agenda.
The cancellations, which clawed back more than $100 million, or nearly half of the agency’s annual budget, threw many organizations into upheaval, forcing some projects to shutter. Now, documents filed in two lawsuits against the agency and DOGE reveal new details about how the mass cancellations took shape, with little input or pushback from the agency’s leadership.
In a joint motion filed Friday, the plaintiffs — the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and the Authors Guild — argue that DOGE illegally took control of the agency and carried out cuts that violated the First Amendment and the equal protection clause of the Constitution. While the cancellations were sweeping, the filing argues, they were driven by a campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that discriminated on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender and other characteristics.
The plaintiffs are asking for reinstatement of the grants. They also want the historical record to show the motives and methods behind what they see as a betrayal of the agency’s mandate to respect “the diverse beliefs and values” of all Americans, as its founding legislation puts it.
“Our federal government is sending a message that only a narrow definition of humanities can be supported, celebrated and invested in, and that there are only a narrow set of people, culture and experiences that are worth understanding in depth,” Sarah Weicksel, the executive director of the American Historical Association, said in an interview.
The humanities endowment and McDonald did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The following account is based on a review of emails, depositions and other internal documents filed in the case.
‘We Are Getting Pressure From the Top’
Since its creation in 1965, the humanities endowment has awarded more than $6.5 billion to support over 70,000 projects, from landmark works like Ken Burns’ documentary “The Civil War” to small local efforts in every part of the country. Grants are typically awarded through a rigorous competitive process, involving multiple rounds of scholarly review.
Law and tradition give chairs, who serve four-year terms, some leeway to promote their priorities. But the endowment is supposed to avoid political advocacy, and many projects receive support across multiple administrations.
Cancellations of grants for political reasons are all but unheard of. In a deposition, McDonald said that in more than two decades at the agency he could recall fewer than a half-dozen grants being revoked, all because a recipient had failed to carry out the promised work.
But the Trump administration had bigger plans.
On March 12, 2025, the agency’s chair at the time, Shelly C. Lowe, a Biden appointee, left at Trump’s direction. The same day, two DOGE employees, Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, arrived.
They had no background in the humanities, they acknowledged in depositions, but believed in DOGE’s broader mission of shrinking “useless small agencies,” as Cavanaugh put it.
Agency staff members, in response to an executive order by Trump banning diversity initiatives across the government, had already created spreadsheets rating all grants made during the Biden administration as having high, medium, low or no “DEI involvement.”
Instead of drawing on those evaluations, court documents show, the DOGE team used ChatGPT to start making its own.
The initial spreadsheet the DOGE team created flagged 1,057 problematic grants. But within two weeks, Fox and Cavanaugh had identified hundreds more as DEI-related or simply “wasteful.” Ultimately, only 42 grants approved during the Biden administration were kept.
Fox and Cavanaugh did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
As it did its work, the DOGE team expressed concerns to McDonald, the acting chair, that the process was not moving fast enough. In an email to him on March 31, Fox wrote: “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.”
After reviewing the DOGE spreadsheet, McDonald expressed reservations about several “important projects” whose cancellation “would not reflect well on any of us.”
Many grants slated for termination were “harmless when it comes to promoting DEI,” McDonald said in an email to Fox on April 1: “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.”
McDonald approved a letter the DOGE team had drafted, and agreed to let them execute the terminations. The letters, which bore McDonald’s signature, started going out April 2 from an unofficial address the DOGE employees had created. Almost immediately, recipients responded with confusion, asking if they were real.
McDonald, in an email, told agency employees to confirm the cancellations but not to provide any additional information. And contrary to usual agency procedures, no appeals would be allowed.
George Washington Is Spared
As the final list took shape, there was discussion about saving some grants relating to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a Trump administration priority.
A grant for scholarly editing of the papers of George Washington was spared. But the papers of Gage, the British general, remained in the DEI dustbin.
In their motion, the plaintiffs claim that the cancellations reflected animus toward disfavored groups, and a belief that scholarship about them was inherently wasteful.
As evidence, the filing notes a list Fox compiled of what he called the “craziest” and “other bad” grants, which he planned to highlight on DOGE’s account on Musk’s X platform. He used three dozen keywords, including “LGBTQ,” “BIPOC,” “tribal,” “ethnicity,” “gender,” “equality,” “immigration,” “citizenship” and “melting pot.” (A majority of the two dozen grants deemed “craziest” related to LGBTQ+ subjects.)
In the deposition, Fox said the list reflected his “subjective” judgment about whether a grant might be out of line with Trump’s executive order.
“‘Crazy’ is one way of saying it,” he said. “‘Most incriminating’ is another way.”
The plaintiffs’ lawyers also asked Fox about some grants flagged in his original ChatGPT search, like one for a documentary about the 1873 massacre in Colfax, Louisiana, where dozens of Black men were murdered by a mob of former Confederates and Ku Klux Klan members.
ChatGPT had deemed it “DEI.” Fox said he agreed. “Because it focuses on exclusively anti-Black violence, which is a race,” he said.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers also noted that Fox’s original ChatGPT search flagged a number of projects relating to the Holocaust, including the documentary about Jewish women who were slave laborers.
Asked if he agreed with ChatGPT, Fox said: “It’s a Jewish — specifically focused on Jewish culture and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture. It’s inherently related to DEI for that reason.”
When the lawyers brought up ChatGPT during the deposition, McDonald, a lawyer who also has a doctorate in literature, appeared to be unaware the DOGE team had used it. He said he did not agree that the grants concerning the Colfax massacre and the Holocaust were related to DEI.
‘America First’ Humanities?
On April 2 of last year, as the grant cancellations were going out, Fox sent McDonald a request: “Please be prepared with your view on the core, capable and mission-aligned folks needed to execute on your renewed direction prioritizing America first grants.”
Over the following months, the agency’s staff was reduced by two-thirds, to about 60 people.
Fox and Cavanaugh left the government last summer to start a technology company called Special. McDonald is still at the agency. On Feb. 4, Trump nominated him as the permanent chair, a position that requires Senate confirmation.
Before joining the endowment in 2003 as its general counsel, McDonald was the chief legal strategist at the Center for Individual Rights, a conservative policy group best known for its opposition to affirmative action. In his deposition, he said that during the Biden administration the humanities agency had become “bloated” and overly focused on diversity. He also criticized new initiatives relating to climate change, calling it a “very controversial issue.”
His understanding, he said, was that the Trump administration wanted “to start afresh,” with “a clean slate.”
As members of the DOGE team did their work, they communicated mainly with McDonald and Adam Wolfson, the agency’s assistant chair for programs, who has been at the agency since 2006. A text exchange included in the court filing suggests the two men shared a dim view of the current direction of academia.
On April 13, McDonald texted Wolfson an article decrying the mass grant cuts. In a response, Wolfson criticized “the tendentious accusation that the administration is acting like all authoritarian (or even totalitarian!) governments to destroy the humanities.”
“The progressive version of the humanities accomplished that some time ago,” he added. “Today it goes by the term wokeness and intersectionality.”
McDonald added a thumbs-up emoji.
In his deposition, McDonald, echoing a widespread critique, reiterated his dismay at “the uniformity of progressive ideology that courses throughout the veins of the humanities these days.” He said he supported the Trump administration’s approach, which he described as “America First” with “a concentration on American civilization, Western civilization, Judeo-Christian civilization, things of that nature.”
Over the past year, McDonald has guided the agency in that direction. In January, it announced $75 million in new grants, including more than $40 million in large awards to conservative-backed civic thought centers and classical humanities institutes that have been established at or near some campuses, to combat the liberal tilt of academia.
Many of the awards went to handpicked recipients who had been invited to apply, outside the agency’s tradition of open, competitive calls for proposals.
While some grant programs are now open only to projects relating to “Western civilization,” the agency has continued funding the sort of work it has long supported: scholarly editing, archival preservation, museum exhibits and public history projects.
But the plaintiffs see a narrowing of acceptable topics and approaches, and a backing away from the belief, expressed in its founding legislation, that “the humanities belong to all Americans.”
