Federal judge finds DOGE’s elimination of humanities grants “unlawful”

Washington — A federal judge ruled Thursday that the Trump administration’s mass elimination of humanities grants to three of the nation’s major scholarly groups was “unlawful” and “unconstitutional.” 

In April 2025, the Department of Government and Efficiency, or DOGE, terminated thousands of grants previously approved by Congress from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Among the grant recipients were the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association of America. 

The groups sued in May 2025 to reverse the actions, arguing that the dismantling of the National Endowment for the Humanities was “unlawful many times over” because the executive branch “has no constitutional authority to block, amend, subvert, or delay spending appropriations based on the president’s own policy preferences.” 

In Thursday’s ruling, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon wrote that the termination of grants to the groups was “in violation of the First Amendment, in violation of the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment, and without statutory authority.” McMahon said that DOGE officials lacked the statutory authority to carry out the grant terminations, and prohibited the administration from enforcing the terminations. 

The decision was consolidated with another lawsuit from The Authors Guild, whose members received grant funding. 

The 143-page decision noted that DOGE staff acknowledged they did not examine any applications or underlying materials when determining which grants to flag, and they used ChatGPT to help come up with rationales for why the grants should be terminated on diversity, equity and inclusion-related grounds. 

McMahon wrote in the opinion that the DOGE staff tasked with leading the effort were in their 20s and “did not have much experience in anything at all — certainly not in anything remotely related to the humanities.”