Fed Judge Rules DOGE Illegally and “Blatantly” Used DEI Terms to Cut Grants |
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A federal judge ruled last week that millions of dollars in cuts made by the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), a quasi-government entity led by billionaire Elon Musk, improperly targeted grants distributed by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) by targeting terminology relating to protected statuses.
The NEH cuts by DOGE staffers “blatantly used” race, gender, and other protections as part of their decision-making process, the ruling from U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon stated.
“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 in her decision that was published on Thursday.
In April 2025, NEH officials, acting on orders from DOGE, canceled hundreds of grants that had already been appropriated by Congress to be disbursed to various programs and projects. In May of that year, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association of America, and the Authors Guild sued the government over the cuts that affected their programs and many others like them.
Notably, DOGE staffers used ChatGPT and keyword searches with terms relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to determine which grant programs they would cut. Some of those terms included the words “history,” “culture,” “identity,” and........