How DOGE Gutted the NEH in 22 Days

When the Department of Government Efficiency was asked last year to identify National Endowment of the Humanities grants that violated President Trump’s executive orders, it enlisted the help of ChatGPT. “Does the following relate at all to DEI?” DOGE staff prompted the AI. “Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation.”

The prompt was revealed in a tranche of discovery material released Friday as part of a case challenging the termination of more than $100 million in grant funding from the NEH.

The trove of documents—including depositions with top NEH administrators and DOGE staff, as well as emails, spreadsheets and text messages—suggest rushed, chaotic funding termination decisions and reveal the extent of DOGE’s influence in terminating 97 percent of the agency’s grants.

In addition to using ChatGPT to review grants, DOGE employees who had no experience in academic research or the humanities determined whether NEH grants should be funded, depositions show.

But there was little pushback on DOGE’s actions from inside the agency; emails show that Michael McDonald, acting chair of the NEH from March 2025 to January 2026, yielded his authority to cancel grant funding to DOGE staff.

‘Haphazard and Unlawful’

Last January, the president signed several executive orders to end federal funding for research grants related to diversity, equity and inclusion; gender ideology; and environmental sustainability. DOGE’s Small Agencies Team met with NEH leaders on March 12; by April 1, the NEH had canceled $100 million in grants and terminated 65 percent of its employees. In May, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association (AHA) and the Modern Language Association, all representing grant recipients, filed a lawsuit seeking to reinstate funding.

In the motion filed Friday, those associations and the Authors Guild called the terminations “unconstitutional” and claimed the NEH violated the First Amendment by targeting grants for their viewpoints and perceived political associations. They argued that the NEH violated the equal protection clause by flagging grant descriptions as “DEI” solely because they included terms such as “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, people of color); “homosexual”; “LGBTQ”; or “Tribal.” They also accused the NEH and its leaders of violating the separation of powers, since DOGE—not the NEH—carried out the termination of the grants, and did it without approval from Congress.

“The facts in this case have exposed the administration’s total disregard for the democratic process and for the value of the humanities that the NEH exists to promote,” said the MLA’s executive director, Paula M. Krebs, in a statement. “Through this lawsuit, we have been able to document in detail the haphazard and unlawful actions of DOGE as these unqualified agents undermined the separation of powers and denied the American people access to vital public programming and research.”

The NEH did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment.

In his deposition, Justin Fox, an employee of the General Services Administration and part of the DOGE Small Agencies Team, said he used the ChatGPT prompt to tag “DEI” grants without instructing the large language model on how to define “DEI.” ChatGPT flagged a number of grants as DEI-related that were ultimately terminated.

Among them was a $349,000 grant to replace an aging HVAC system at the High Point Museum in North Carolina. “Improving HVAC systems enhances preservation conditions for collections, aligning with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences,” the ChatGPT DEI rationale stated.

Another project from the University of Oregon Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln seeking funds to support local newspaper digitization and preservation programs was marked “yes” as relating to DEI because the initiative “seeks to enhance digital newspaper programs, making them more accessible and customizable which aligns with DEI goals of inclusivity and representation.”

Sarah Weicksel, executive director of the AHA, said she was surprised by the reckless use of a chatbot to analyze grants and the lack of scrutiny of the results.

“You have two people [from DOGE] who have no background in the humanities whatsoever … and they’re the ones who do the cancellations,” she told Inside Higher Ed. “That’s one of the things that has really stuck out—just how unqualified these two people [from DOGE] were to make any assessment whatsoever about the quality of the grants—grants that had already been through a rigorous peer-review process, been identified as useful projects for advancing scholarship and teaching.”

Yielding Authority

The NEH was founded in 1965 as an independent federal agency and is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States. McDonald has worked at the NEH for more than two decades, most of that time as general counsel. He was named acting director in March 2025 after Trump advised Shelly Lowe, a Biden appointee, to step down.

The internal communications spanning three weeks in March reveal McDonald’s lack of leadership in allowing the cancellation of millions of dollars in grant funding.

Throughout the month, DOGE and NEH staff exchanged a flurry of spreadsheets. One listed grants that were reviewed by DOGE staff using ChatGPT—a practice McDonald was unaware of. Another included grants that NEH staff marked “N/A”—not in violation of the executive orders.

In an email to DOGE staff, McDonald said he felt “much less confident” about terminating grants that the NEH team had labeled N/A. “But in the interest of time, because we know you want to move quickly, we didn’t give these applications the individualized consideration that we did to those in the first spreadsheet,” he told Fox in an April 1 email. “Accordingly, we only explicitly initialed a few important projects—such as the papers of George Washington—whose cancellation would not reflect well on any of us.”

McDonald told deposition lawyers he was the “final decider” for all grant terminations and took responsibility for the decisions. But in reality, DOGE staff terminated grants his team had recommended the agency keep. “As you’ve made clear, it’s your decision on whether to discontinue funding any of the projects on this list,” McDonald wrote to the DOGE team in the April 1 email.

DOGE staff also drafted and sent termination letters to grantees on McDonald’s behalf that contained factual errors. The notices incorrectly cited as a basis for termination an executive order mandating that the NEH “eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions,” although no such executive order exists. McDonald said in the deposition that he did not review the letter “as closely as perhaps I should have.”

Rather than follow standard procedure and send the termination notices through the office of grant management, DOGE’s Fox sent them himself using a Microsoft email account. McDonald said it was the first time he could recall that the NEH’s duties were carried out by another part of the federal government.

Emails also show that DOGE staff applied pressure on McDonald and his team to move quickly on their agenda. In a series of messages on March 31, the day before 1,400 grants were terminated, Fox sent several urgent messages to McDonald asking him to call him. He 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.”

Nate Cavanaugh, Fox’s superior at DOGE, told lawyers in a January 2026 deposition that his team was pushing McDonald to “move faster.”

“We would tell Mike that we were getting pressure from basically the White House to effectuate these contract and grant terminations that are aligned with the EO. So it was a time pressure tactic. There was no person explicitly putting pressure on Justin to send this email.”

When asked about DOGE’s concerns that he and his team were slow-walking efforts to enact the executive order, McDonald said they were unfounded.

“I believe that I had a responsibility, having accepted the position in directing the agency, which in my view is part of the executive branch of government. We were given instructions by the President to cooperate with DOGE in its work. And no, I didn’t feel that there were any reasons for obstruction, certainly on my part.”

Though the volume of grants the NEH culled is unprecedented in the agency’s history, McDonald said he agreed with many of the terminations on the grounds that they supported DEI, noting that the humanities on college campuses have become more politically liberal.

The NEH is once again awarding grants, but most are going to conservative-aligned projects, including $10 million grants to two public universities with “civics” schools and to an education network headquartered at a conservative think tank. And at the beginning of February, Trump nominated McDonald to serve as the permanent chairperson of the NEH. He’s awaiting Senate confirmation.

Weicksel at AHA said she is concerned about the agency’s ability to fulfill its mission, given that it is understaffed and pressured to align funding opportunities with the White House’s directives.

“If the agency is expected to fulfill the expectations of the executive branch, I worry that it will be unable to fund the wide range of projects that explore so many interesting facets of the human experience, both here in the United States and around the world,” she said.

“I want to see the NEH continue its work as it had in the past, prior to this massive grant termination. I want to see it fulfill the mission that was laid out in its founding legislation, which is to promote progress and scholarship in the humanities for all people and to foster a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination and inquiry.”