When the Trump administration went looking last spring for National Endowment for the Humanities grants to cut, it turned to a familiar scourge of professors: ChatGPT.
Last March, two employees from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency arrived at the agency with the mandate of canceling previously approved grants that ran afoul of President Trump’s agenda. But instead of looking closely at funded projects, they pulled short summaries off the internet and fed them into the A.I. chatbot.
The prompt was simple: “Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’” The results were sweeping, and sometimes bizarre.
Building improvements at an Indigenous languages archive in Alaska risked “promoting inclusion and diverse perspectives.” Renewal of a longstanding grant to digitize Black newspapers and add them to a historical database was “D.E.I.” So was work on a 40-volume scholarly series on the history of American music.
A documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust? The focus on gender risked “contributing to D.E.I. by amplifying marginalized voices.”
Even an effort to catalog and digitize the papers of Thomas Gage, a British general in the American Revolution, was guilty of “promoting inclusivity and diversity in historical research.”
The DOGE employees did not appear to question ChatGPT’s judgments, and continued hunting for unacceptable projects. Two weeks later, they sent a master list of 1,477 problematic awards — nearly every active grant made during the Biden administration — to Michael McDonald, the endowment’s acting chairman.
Mr. McDonald, a veteran of the agency, agreed to let DOGE terminate them, creating what he later described as a “clean slate” for Mr. Trump’s “America First” agenda.
The cancellations, which clawed back more than $100 million, or nearly half of the agency’s annual budget, threw many organizations into upheaval, forcing some projects to shutter. Now, documents filed in two lawsuits against the agency and DOGE reveal new details about how the mass cancellations took shape, with little input or pushback from the agency’s leadership.
In a joint motion filed on Friday, the plaintiffs — the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and the Authors Guild — argue that DOGE illegally took control of the agency and carried out cuts that violated the First Amendment and the equal protection clause of the Constitution. While the cancellations were sweeping, the filing argues, they were driven by a campaign against D.E.I. that discriminated on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender and other characteristics.
The plaintiffs are asking for reinstatement of the grants. They also want the historical record to show the motives and methods behind what they see as a betrayal of the agency’s mandate to respect “the diverse beliefs and values” of all Americans, as its founding legislation puts it.
“Our federal government is sending a message that only a narrow definition of humanities can be supported, celebrated and invested in, and that there are only a narrow set of people, culture and experiences that are worth understanding in depth,” Sarah Weicksel, the executive director of the American Historical Association, said in an interview.
The humanities endowment and Mr. McDonald did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The following account is based on a review of emails, depositions and other internal documents filed in the case.
‘We Are Getting Pressure From the Top’
Since its creation in 1965, the humanities endowment has awarded more than $6.5 billion to support over 70,000 projects, from landmark works like Ken Burns’s documentary “The Civil War” to small local efforts in every part of the country. Grants are typically awarded through a rigorous competitive process, involving multiple rounds of scholarly review.
Law and tradition give chairs, who serve four-year terms, some leeway to promote their priorities. But the endowment is supposed to avoid political advocacy, and many projects receive support across multiple administrations.
Cancellations of grants for political reasons are all but unheard of. In a deposition, Mr. McDonald said that in more than two decades at the agency he could recall fewer than a half-dozen grants being revoked, all because a recipient had failed to carry out the promised work.
But the Trump administration had bigger plans.
On March 12, 2025, the agency’s chairwoman at the time, Shelly C. Lowe, a Biden appointee, left at Mr. Trump’s direction. The same day, two DOGE employees, Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, arrived.
They had no background in the humanities, they acknowledged in depositions, but believed in DOGE’s broader mission of shrinking “useless small agencies,” as Mr. Cavanaugh put it.
Agency staff members, in response to an executive order by Mr. Trump banning diversity initiatives across the government, had already created spreadsheets rating all grants made during the Biden administration as having high, medium, low or no “D.E.I. involvement.”
Instead of drawing on those evaluations, court documents show, the DOGE team used ChatGPT to start making its own.
The initial spreadsheet the DOGE team created flagged 1,057 problematic grants. But within two weeks, Mr. Fox and Mr. Cavanaugh had identified hundreds more as D.E.I.-related or simply “wasteful.” Ultimately, only 42 grants approved during the Biden administration were kept.
Mr. Fox and Mr. Cavanaugh did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
As it did its work, the DOGE team expressed concerns to Mr. McDonald, the acting chair, that the process was not moving fast enough. In an email to him on March 31, Mr. Fox wrote:
After reviewing the DOGE spreadsheet, Mr. McDonald expressed reservations about several “important projects” whose cancellation “would not reflect well on any of us.”
Many grants slated for termination were “harmless when it comes to promoting D.E.I.,” Mr. McDonald said in an email to Mr. Fox on April 1:
Mr. McDonald approved a letter the DOGE team had drafted, and agreed to let them execute the terminations. The letters, which bore Mr. McDonald’s signature, started going out on April 2 from an unofficial address the DOGE employees had created. Almost immediately, recipients responded with confusion, asking if they were real.
Mr. McDonald, in an email, told agency employees to confirm the cancellations but not to provide any additional information. And contrary to usual agency procedures, no appeals would be allowed.
George Washington Is Spared
As the final list took shape, there was discussion about saving some grants relating to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a Trump administration priority.
A grant for scholarly editing of the papers of George Washington was spared. But the papers of Thomas Gage, the British general, remained in the D.E.I. dustbin.
There was also back-and-forth about whether to continue support for National History Day, a history competition that reaches roughly 500,000 middle and high school students across the country each year.
In an email to Mr. Fox, Mr. McDonald expressed skepticism that the organizer, despite receiving a $450,000 grant in the first Trump administration, would be a “reliable partner.”
“I was never a particular fan of National History Day,” Mr. McDonald said in the deposition. In his view, he said, it “tilted left.”
In their motion, the plaintiffs claim that the cancellations reflected animus toward disfavored groups, and a belief that scholarship about them was inherently wasteful.
As evidence, the filing notes a list Mr. Fox compiled of what he called the “craziest” and “other bad” grants, which he planned to highlight on DOGE’s X account. He used three dozen keywords, including “L.G.B.T.Q.,” “BIPOC,” “tribal,” “ethnicity,” “gender,” “equality,” “immigration,” “citizenship” and “melting pot.” (A majority of the two dozen grants deemed “craziest” related to L.G.B.T.Q. subjects.)
In the deposition, Mr. Fox said the list reflected his “subjective” judgment about whether a grant might be out of line with Mr. Trump’s executive order.
“‘Crazy’ is one way of saying it,” he said. “‘Most incriminating’ is another way.”
The plaintiffs’ lawyers also asked Mr. Fox about some grants flagged in his original ChatGPT search, like one for a documentary about the 1873 massacre in Colfax, La., where dozens of Black men were murdered by a mob of former Confederates and Ku Klux Klan members.
ChatGPT had deemed it “D.E.I.” Mr. Fox said he agreed. “Because it focuses on exclusively anti-Black violence, which is a race,” he said.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers also noted that Mr. Fox’s original ChatGPT search flagged a number of projects relating to the Holocaust, including the documentary about Jewish women who were slave laborers.
Asked if he agreed with ChatGPT, Mr. Fox said: “It’s a Jewish — specifically focused on Jewish culture and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture. It’s inherently related to D.E.I. for that reason.”
When the lawyers brought up ChatGPT during the deposition, Mr. McDonald, a lawyer who also has a doctorate in literature, appeared to be unaware the DOGE team had used it. He said he did not agree that the grants concerning the Colfax massacre and the Holocaust were related to D.E.I.
But he claimed responsibility for all the grant cuts. “I was the final decider,” he said. “I made that decision.”
(In a legal action unrelated to the dispute at the humanities endowment, The New York Times sued ChatGPT’s maker, OpenAI, and its partner Microsoft in 2023, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied those claims.)
‘America First’ Humanities?
On April 2 of last year, as the grant cancellations were going out, Mr. Fox sent Mr. McDonald a request:
Over the following months, the agency’s staff was reduced by two-thirds, to about 60 people.
Mr. Fox and Mr. Cavanaugh left the government last summer to start a technology company called Special. Mr. McDonald is still at the agency. On Feb. 4, Mr. Trump nominated him as the permanent chair, a position that requires Senate confirmation.
Before joining the endowment in 2003 as its general counsel, Mr. McDonald was the chief legal strategist at the Center for Individual Rights, a conservative policy group best known for its opposition to affirmative action. In his deposition, he said that during the Biden administration the humanities agency had become “bloated” and overly focused on diversity. He also criticized new initiatives relating to climate change, calling it a “very controversial issue.”
His understanding, he said, was that the Trump administration wanted “to start afresh,” with “a clean slate.”
As members of the DOGE team did their work, they communicated mainly with Mr. McDonald and Adam Wolfson, the agency’s assistant chair for programs, who has been at the agency since 2006. A text exchange included in the court filing suggests the two men shared a dim view of the current direction of academia.
On April 13, Mr. McDonald texted Mr. Wolfson an article decrying the mass grant cuts. In a response, Mr. Wolfson criticized “the tendentious accusation that the administration is acting like all authoritarian (or even totalitarian!) governments to destroy the humanities.”
“The progressive version of the humanities accomplished that some time ago,” he added. “Today it goes by the term wokeness and intersectionality.”
Mr. McDonald added a thumbs-up emoji.
In his deposition, Mr. McDonald, echoing a widespread critique, reiterated his dismay at “the uniformity of progressive ideology that courses throughout the veins of the humanities these days.” He said he supported the Trump administration’s approach, which he described as “America First” with “a concentration on American civilization, Western civilization, Judeo-Christian civilization, things of that nature.”
Over the past year, Mr. McDonald has guided the agency in that direction. In January, it announced $75 million in new grants, including more than $40 million in large awards to conservative-backed civic thought centers and classical humanities institutes that have been established at or near some campuses, to combat the liberal tilt of academia.
Many of the awards went to handpicked recipients who had been invited to apply, outside the agency’s tradition of open, competitive calls for proposals.
The court documents shed some light on the origins of one large grant that has drawn particular scrutiny: a $10.4 million award — the largest in the agency’s history — to Tikvah, a conservative Jewish educational organization, for a broad project promoting the study of Jewish civilization and Western culture.
Asked by the plaintiffs’ lawyers why Tikvah, which had never applied for a federal grant, was tapped for such a large uncompetitive award, Mr. Wolfson said Mr. McDonald had been impressed by an episode of its podcast and asked him to reach out.
Asked about any personal connections with Tikvah, Mr. Wolfson said his wife had previously been involved with a program there, and is currently the managing director of a separate foundation established by a former Tikvah board chair.
But Mr. Wolfson said he had no role in the grant beyond making introductions. “I was not involved in the review of the application or anything,” he said. (Mr. Wolfson did not respond to a request for comment.)
The humanities endowment’s 17-member outside scholarly council, which by law must advise on most grants, voted not to recommend the Tikvah award, but Mr. McDonald overruled it. Last October, shortly after the grant was publicly announced, the White House fired most members of the board, with no reason given.
While some grant programs are now open only to projects relating to “Western civilization,” the agency has continued funding the sort of work it has long funded: scholarly editing, archival preservation, museum exhibits and public history projects.
But the plaintiffs see a narrowing of acceptable topics and approaches, and a backing away from the belief, expressed in its founding legislation, that “the humanities belong to all Americans.”
Joy Connolly, the president of the American Council of Learned Societies, cited George Washington’s belief that a democratic nation requires an educated citizenry. She also mentioned the hit movie “Sinners,” which has taken in nearly $280 million at the domestic box office.
“That film rests on generations of decades of research into history — the history of music, the history of slavery,” she said. “It wasn’t just whipped up overnight with ChatGPT.”
“Americans want this stuff,” she said. “They pay to go see it.”
Jennifer Schuessler is a reporter for the Culture section of The Times who covers intellectual life and the world of ideas.
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