The technical DOGE staffers were sold to us as Silicon Valley brain geniuses, the best engineers that start-up culture could produce. This despite their famously inaccurate wall of receipts being hacked on its very first day.
In fact, the DOGE engineers were at best social engineers, male Karens adept at calling the manager, at least when the manager had been installed by their oligarch Leader, turkey baster-wielding Elon Musk.
The Department of Government Efficiency’s cancellation of over $100 million in grants was unconstitutional, according to a ruling on Thursday. In the 143-page decision, US District Judge Colleen McMahon cites DOGE’s process for eliminating grants, which involved using ChatGPT to determine if something is related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
The ruling, which stems from a 2025 lawsuit filed by humanities groups, says “it could not be more obvious that DOGE used the mere presence of particular, protected characteristics to disqualify grants from continued funding” from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Judge McMahon cites several instances in which DOGE appeared to use ChatGPT to scan and eliminate grants using their relation to characteristics like race, national origin, religion, and sexuality.
[DOGE staffer Justin] Fox testified that he used ChatGPT “[t]o highlight why [a] grant may relate to DEI” and “to pull out anything related to DEI.” To do so, he submitted each cursory grant description from the [National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)] spreadsheet to ChatGPT using a standardized prompt: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation.” Fox testified that he did not define “DEI” for ChatGPT and that he did not have the slightest idea how ChatGPT understood the term.
Lambert here: Unfortunately, McMahon, Fox, and Verge are all giving ChatGPT far too much credit, and making the same mistake: They are confusing the pointing finger (words, or rather strings, which is what ChatGPT processes) with the moon (the thing, the reality out there). ChatGPT is not “using” “characteristics like race” to fund or defund grants; it is detecting the presence of strings (“Black,” “racism”) and reporting them to a human who then infers the presence of those characteristics. A fine example of this method is DOGE brain geniuses scanning personnel files for the word “probation” and then eliminating personnel with positive hits (the “pointing finger”), when “probation” often meant that a civil servant was to be promoted for performance, but the final approval had not come through (the moon).
But don’t worry. Exactly the same cast of thought and methodology will be applied to your student loans, tax returns, and Social Security!