An Inside Higher Ed investigation published March 11, 2026 reported that DOGE's Small Agencies Team gutted the National Endowment for the Humanities in 22 days: the team met with NEH leaders on March 12, 2025, and by April 1 the NEH had canceled $100 million in grants and terminated 65 percent of its employees. Discovery material shows DOGE used ChatGPT to flag grants as DEI-related with the prompt “Does the following relate at all to DEI?” followed by the instruction “Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with 'Yes.' or 'No.' followed by a brief explanation.”
The documents reveal the extent of DOGE's influence in terminating 97 percent of the agency's grants, Inside Higher Ed reported. According to the plaintiffs, grants flagged as DEI and then terminated included a documentary about Jewish women's slave labor during the Holocaust, an archival project on the lives of Italian Americans, a project to digitize photograph collections of Appalachian residents, and multiple projects to preserve endangered Native American languages and cultures. ChatGPT also flagged a $349,000 grant to replace an aging HVAC system at the High Point Museum in North Carolina.
The NEH was founded in 1965 and is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States. Depositions show that DOGE employees with no experience in academic research or the humanities determined whether NEH grants should be funded, and that DOGE staff terminated grants NEH staff had recommended keeping.
The American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association filed a lawsuit in May 2025 challenging the grant terminations. Discovery material released in March 2026, including depositions, emails, spreadsheets and text messages, revealed the ChatGPT-powered process.
Update (October 2, 2026): On May 7, 2026, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon declared the terminations unlawful, concluded that the DOGE staffers lacked the authority to make those decisions, and blocked the administration from carrying out the grant terminations, ABC News reported. She found that DOGE “blatantly used protected characteristics as criteria for grant termination” and wrote, “Treating Black civil-rights history, Jewish testimony about the Holocaust, the oft-forgotten Asian American experience, the shameful treatment of the children of Native tribes, or the mere mention of a woman as a marker of lack of merit or wastefulness is not lawful.”
Correction (October 2, 2026): This entry quoted the ChatGPT prompt as asking for a response “in less than 120 characters”; the prompt in the discovery material reads “Respond factually in less than 120 characters,” and the full prompt is now quoted. The entry also described the staffers as “young,” which its sources do not support; it now says, per the depositions, that they had no experience in academic research or the humanities. The example projects are now attributed to the plaintiffs, whose release lists them.