Members of the U.S. DOGE Service spoke regularly over Signal, the encrypted chat service that can auto-delete messages. They were informally recruited by people they knew. And other government employees didn’t know who was “DOGE.”
When DOGE members were deposed in January as part of a lawsuit over cuts to grants awarded to the National Endowment for the Humanities, they described a vague network of similarly minded technologists and lawyers who had been tasked with a vast mandate to reduce federal spending. They also described a lack of structure that allowed them to operate with little oversight or understanding of what others might be doing.
“DOGE felt more like a club,” Justin Fox, an investment banker turned DOGE staffer, told attorneys in one of the video depositions released last month.
A year after Elon Musk brought in a cohort of allies from Silicon Valley to remake the government, through a newly established Department of Government Efficiency, lawsuits and public record releases have steadily begun shedding light on who was in DOGE and how its members approached their roles.
The depositions, in a lawsuit over DOGE using ChatGPT to propose cuts to about 1,400 humanities grants, have answered some questions about how the group — which is not part of the Cabinet — formed and operated with little scrutiny. In one moment that went viral, Fox was asked why he described a documentary about female Holocaust victims as “inherently discriminatory” and sought to cut off its federal funding. In another, his colleague Nathan Cavanaugh acknowledged that DOGE did not reduce the federal deficit.
The disclosures have confirmed news coverage from last year about the extent of DOGE cuts and identified several key DOGE figures operating in federal agencies. For instance, in January, the Department of Energy responded to liberal watchdog group American Oversight’s requests for the names and titles of members of its DOGE team, acknowledging one previously unnamed member: Alexander Glaubach, a former tech investor, who has since launched an artificial intelligence start-up. In response to one of the lawsuits, the government shared two lists of 188 people whom it identified as being part of DOGE, including career civil servants at the former U.S. Digital Service and contractors at an HR firm. The lists excluded at least 19 DOGE members whom The Washington Post previously identified, according to an analysis of records.
Thousands of pages of documents about DOGE have recently been shared with groups that filed public records requests last year, and The Post reviewed a significant portion of these troves to better understand what new information has been revealed. Many of the pages had redactions, and the files still do not provide the full context of DOGE’s work in government.
The Trump administration has fought to withhold information about what DOGE did and argued that the group is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, asking the Supreme Court last month to overturn an order from the U.S. District Court for D.C. to provide records to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). The administration has also argued that Musk and Amy Gleason, the person who the administration had said was leading DOGE, should not have to sit for depositions.
CREW’s chief counsel, Nikhel Sus, said the effort to shield DOGE from FOIA mandates is a delay tactic to impede CREW’s ability to access records — and hold up other cases.
“There’s a domino effect,” Sus told The Post. “These delay tactics are impeding the ability to get answers in this case and other cases.”
White House spokesman Davis Ingle did not directly respond to The Post’s questions about the government’s efforts to withhold information about DOGE or the new details revealed by litigation and public records requests but said the government has “fully complied with discovery requests.”
“President Trump was given a clear mandate to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from the federal government,” Ingle said in a statement. “In just a year, he has made significant progress in making the federal government more efficient to better serve the American taxpayer.”
Asking ChatGPT about DEI
The video depositions are the result of DOGE members’ actions at an arm of the federal government that normally doesn’t receive much attention: the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The lawsuit centers on a few weeks last spring when DOGE targeted the NEH, cutting federal funding for research grants the group deemed as related to diversity, equity and inclusion — part of the Trump administration’s broad rollback of DEI initiatives across government. Cavanaugh and Fox led the mission.
To flag so-called DEI grants, DOGE members used ChatGPT, giving the AI chatbot these instructions: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation.”
The plaintiffs in the case — American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association — have argued that the terminations violated the First Amendment and the equal protection clause for unfairly targeting grants for political reasons, noting that grants awarded during the previous Democratic administration were the particular focus. The Trump administration has argued that the cancellations don’t violate the First Amendment because the government is not obligated to subsidize projects it no longer believes to be in the public interest.
The plaintiffs have also argued that DOGE had unprecedented control, and they shared records received through discovery that showed how officials at the NEH appeared to have capitulated to DOGE, though members said in depositions that their role was to advise.
In one email last April, then-NEH acting chair Michael McDonald, a longtime NEH official whom Trump placed in the top job after firing Biden appointee Shelly Lowe, wrote to Fox that he understood DOGE wanted to move quickly and cancel grants even if they didn’t relate to DEI.
“Either way, as you’ve made clear, it’s your decision on whether to discontinue funding any of the projects on this list,” McDonald told Fox.
DOGE soon sent cancellation emails to hundreds of grant recipients, causing widespread confusion. Brett Bobley, the NEH’s chief information officer, wrote to Dartmouth College officials that same month that NEH staff was unaware what was happening.
The canceled funding included grants for the replacement of aging HVAC systems at several federally funded museums, digitization of local historical newspapers and documentaries about subjects such as Jewish women in the Holocaust, Black cultural icons and the civil rights movement.
When the Cavanaugh and Fox depositions were published online last month, the administration pushed to have them taken down. But a judge decided otherwise, noting that “the videos concern 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.”
‘Possible someone will go public’
Across the government, grant and contract cancellations occurred at an unprecedented pace and caused much confusion, according to records reviewed by The Post.
At the Department of Veterans Affairs, a flurry of emails from February 2025 that were publicly disclosed last month showed that contract cancellations spread alarm among staff members.
On Feb. 12, Maria Kelly, executive director of the National Radiation Oncology Program, passed along a warning to all the chiefs of radiation oncology: “Apparently medical physicist contracts are being flagged by DOGE. We need to be informed if this happens at your site. We will draft something tomorrow that you can use to support the need for a contract.”
VA officials also discussed trying to stop DOGE’s termination of a contract that provides technical help to the office assisting homeless veterans, among about four dozen contracts that DOGE and VA Secretary Douglas A. Collins approved for cancellation.
“They will pull back on this decision,” acting VA undersecretary for health Steve Lieberman told other officials on Feb. 13. “Hopefully should be all set.”
“OMG I have no words,” Monica Diaz, executive director of the department’s Homeless Programs Office, wrote back with a prayer-hands emoji. Another official also celebrated the “great news.”
The next day, Lieberman warned others that this might become public.
“It sounds like she addressed [their] concerns, but it is always possible someone will go public about this,” he wrote.
In the same month, a person whose name was redacted wrote to Lieberman that “Musk has moved in to the FDA building. And is sleeping there. [REDACTED] is going nuts!”
Several groups requesting the records noted that FOIA offices have redacted significant portions — and litigation to get the offices to turn over other records is ongoing.
In several court filings, the names of DOGE members have been withheld. Even within the government agencies targeted, it wasn’t always clear who was DOGE and who wasn’t, according to federal workers and records.
In May, Jonathan Mendelson, a former investor at San Francisco venture capital firm Accel who was then embedded with the General Services Administration, emailed the Federal Communications Commission’s leaders to “discuss getting a DOGE team detailed over to the agency.” FCC Chief of Staff Scott Delacourt responded that DOGE members Tarak Makecha, Jordan Wick and Jacob Altik had been working at the FCC since March. Mendelson said to disregard his email in that case.
“That was easier than expected,” Delacourt wrote to other FCC leaders.
In other instances, DOGE was less a source of confusion and more a subject of jokes.
After FCC Chairman Brendan Carr shared a request to format documents with single-line spacing and two spaces after periods in February 2025, his chief of staff, Greg Watson, forwarded the style guidance with a warning: “Those who fail to comply will be reported to DOGE.”
Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
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