A federal judge has ruled that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, widely known as DOGE, unlawfully used race, gender, and other protected classes to carry out sweeping cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities. According to ABC News, the cuts stem from the Humanities grants, blocking one of the Trump administration’s most controversial federal funding crackdowns.
U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon issued a forceful 143 page ruling Thursday, May 8, declaring DOGE’s review process unconstitutional and permanently barring the administration. Examples include terminating more than $100 million in humanities grants that supported projects tied to African American history, Holocaust education, women’s studies, Native American history, and other historically marginalized narratives.
“There can be no serious dispute that the review process implemented by DOGE did not conform to, or even resemble, NEH’s ordinary grant review process,” McMahon wrote, according to ABC News.
The ruling portrays a legal rebuke to both Musk’s purported federal cost cutting initiative and the anti-DEI agenda that intensified after President Donald Trump’s return to office.
ChatGPT And DEI Keywords At Center Of Federal Cuts
ABC News reports that depositions from former DOGE staffers Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh revealed staff used ChatGPT alongside targeted DEI related keywords such as “DEI,” “Equity,” “Inclusion,” “BIPOC,” and “LGBTQ” to identify grants for elimination.
Judge McMahon sharply condemned that strategy, ruling DOGE “blatantly used protected characteristics as criteria for grant termination.”
According to PEOPLE, Fox directly copied and pasted ChatGPT generated “DEI rationales” into spreadsheets that became the basis for terminating roughly 1,400 federal grants between April 1 and April 3, 2025.
“The Government cannot escape liability for DOGE’s work by scapegoating ChatGPT,” McMahon wrote, according to PEOPLE. “The Government cannot treat AI output as the act of some independent, intervening actor.”
Black History, Holocaust Education, And Marginalized Voices Targeted
McMahon’s ruling showcases the disproportionate elimination of projects centered on Black civil rights history, Jewish Holocaust testimony, Asian American experiences, Native American children, and women focused scholarship.
“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,” McMahon wrote.
PEOPLE further reports that among the terminated grants was funding for a documentary on the Colfax Massacre, the 1873 slaughter of Black Louisianans by former Confederates and Ku Klux Klan members during Reconstruction. Court documents showed ChatGPT flagged the project as DEI related due to its focus on anti-Black violence.
Holocaust education projects centered on Jewish women survivors were also cut, prompting McMahon to call the government’s actions “deeply troubling” amid rising antisemitism.
Humanities Organizations Celebrate Landmark Decision
The American Council of Learned Societies, one of the nonprofit groups that challenged DOGE’s cuts, praised the ruling as a critical victory.
“The humanities are not a luxury. They are how a democracy understands itself,” ACLS President Joy Connolly said in a statement.
Though DOGE staffers argued their actions were designed to reduce the federal deficit, ABC News noted Cavanaugh later admitted under oath that DOGE did not actually reduce the deficit.
Critics are also raising serious constitutional questions about the role of artificial intelligence in government policy making.
