On Monday a judge said videos of recent depositions from DOGE members can be published online once again. The ruling is something of an about face for Judge Colleen McMahon, who originally ordered plaintiffs in the DOGE-related lawsuit “claw back” the videos they had published to YouTube. The videos were already massively viral at the time of that ruling, in part because they showed DOGE members Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh unable or unwilling to define DEI, admitting their use of ChatGPT to filter contracts to potentially axe based on words like “Black” and “homosexual” but not “white,” and were broadly one of the first times the public has directly heard from people inside DOGE.
The American Council of Learned Societies is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, along with the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association. The organizations are suing Fox, Cavanaugh, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and others for their role in cutting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts they perceived as being DEI-related.
In her ruling McMahon wrote, “[T]he testimony in the videos concerns the conduct of public officials acting in their official capacities—a context in which the public interest in transparency and accountability is at its apex […] The subject matter of this testimony—how government officials carried out their official responsibilities—falls squarely within that core public interest.”
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