The American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and the American Council of Learned Societies — all plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the National Endowment for the Humanities over DOGE’s mass grant cancellations — had uploaded the full video depositions of four government witnesses to YouTube.
I had already written about what the legal filings revealed back in February, well before the NY Times published its own deep dive into the depositions last week. But the videos added something the transcripts couldn’t fully capture: the demeanor of two young guys with zero government experience who were handed the power to destroy hundreds of millions of dollars in already-approved humanities grants, and who were now forced to sit there, on camera, and attempt (weakly) to explain themselves. Before I could publish my piece, 404 Media’s Joseph Cox covered some of what was found in the depositions….
And then, of course, the government got the videos taken down. Because these alpha disruptors who thought they were saving America by nuking grants for Holocaust documentaries and Black civil rights research turned out to be too fragile to withstand a little internet mockery for their dipshittery.
Lambert here: Ouch! Now come absolutely brutal transcripts from FOX and Cavanaugh, which I’m skipping since they’re published elsewhere….
Out of all grants approved during the Biden administration, only 42 were kept. The rest — 1,477 grants — were terminated. No appeals were allowed. Termination letters bore [Acting NEH Chairman Michael McDonald’s] signature but were sent from an unofficial email address the DOGE employees created. McDonald himself admitted he didn’t draft the letters and couldn’t tell you how many grants were cut. And when pressed on whether the grants concerning the Colfax Massacre and the Holocaust were actually DEI, McDonald — who, unlike Fox and Cavanaugh, actually has a doctorate in literature — said he didn’t agree they were. But he signed off on their termination anyway.
Oh, and McDonald apparently didn’t even know Fox and Cavanaugh had used ChatGPT to make the determinations.
So that’s the substance. Two unqualified guys, a chatbot, a keyword list built on culture war grievances, and the destruction of a century-old institution’s grant portfolio in about two weeks. We covered the mechanics in February. The depositions just put it all on video, in their own words, in all its arrogant, ignorant glory.
These are the people who DOGE sent to reshape the government.