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 Trump’s agenda. But instead of looking closely at funded projects, they pulled short summaries off the internet and fed them into the A.I. chatbot.
The prompt was simple: “Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.? Respond factually in less than 120 characters.
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 chairman.
Mr. McDonald, a veteran of the agency, agreed to let DOGE terminate them, creating what he later described as a “clean slate” for Mr. 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.
On March 12, 2025, the agency’s chairwoman at the time, Shelly C. Lowe, a Biden appointee, left at Mr. Trump’s direction. The same day, two DOGE employees, Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, arrived.
Agency staff members, in response to an executive order by Mr. 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 “D.E.I. involvement.”
In a joint motion filed on 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.
As evidence, the filing notes a list Mr. Fox compiled of what he called the “craziest” and “other bad” grants, which he planned to highlight on DOGE’s X account. He used three dozen keywords, including “L.G.B.T.Q.,” “BIPOC,” “tribal,” “ethnicity,” “gender,” “equality,” “immigration,” “citizenship” and “melting pot.” (A majority of the two dozen grants deemed “craziest” related to L.G.B.T.Q. subjects.)
In the deposition, Mr. Fox said the list reflected his “subjective” judgment about whether a grant might be out of line with Mr. Trump’s executive order.
“‘Crazy’ is one way of saying it,” he said. “‘Most incriminating’ is another way.”
Instead of drawing on those evaluations, court documents show, the DOGE team used ChatGPT to start making its own.
Mr. Fox and Mr. Cavanaugh left the government last summer to start a technology company called Special. Mr. McDonald is still at the agency. On Feb. 4, Mr. Trump nominated him as the permanent chair, a position that requires Senate confirmation.
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