A Manhattan judge on Friday ordered that video depositions of two former employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency be removed from the internet, after they became fodder for viral social media posts mocking the two men.
The videos had been posted on YouTube by scholarly groups who are suing to restore sweeping grant cuts that DOGE helped carry out last spring at the National Endowment for the Humanities. On Friday, the government said in an emergency filing that the groups had improperly posted the depositions and that at least one witness, Justin Fox, a former DOGE employee, had been subjected to significant harassment, including death threats.
Mr. Fox and another former DOGE employee, Nate Cavanaugh, had each testified in their depositions that they used ChatGPT to identify grants that ran afoul of President Trump’s executive order banning “radical and wasteful government D.E.I. programs.” The two men, who had previously worked in technology and finance, acknowledged they had no background in the humanities, but believed in DOGE’s broader mission of shrinking “useless small agencies,” as Mr. Cavanaugh put it.
Last week, as part of a court filing, the scholarly groups posted nearly 25 hours of depositions online of four people involved in the case, including the former DOGE employees. After an article about the case appeared in The New York Times, excerpts from the videos began ricocheting across social media, prompting scathing commentary about what was seen as the DOGE employees’ cavalier demeanor and torturous justifications of ChatGPT’s decisions, many of which targeted projects dealing with race, gender and discrimination.
In one widely circulated clip, Mr. Fox is asked whether he agreed with ChatGPT’s flagging of a documentary about Jewish women who were slave laborers in the Holocaust.
“It’s a Jewish — specifically focused on Jewish culture and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture,” Mr. Fox explains. “It’s inherently related to D.E.I. for that reason.”
Clips like this drew widespread ridicule, but also defense from some prominent figures. On Friday morning, Mr. Musk reposted a clip of Mr. Cavanaugh, calling him “legendarily based” and adding a flexed bicep emoji.
The cuts, which ultimately expanded to include virtually every active grant approved during the Biden administration, threw many recipient organizations into upheaval and forced some projects to disband.
In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs — the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association and the Authors Guild — argued 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.
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But their filing last week set off a legal dispute of its own. On Tuesday, as clips of the depositions began drawing ridicule across the internet, the government asked the judge, Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court, to require the plaintiffs to remove them. Their dissemination, the government said, had “no legitimate bearing” on the issues in the case and posed a risk to government witnesses and their family members.
On Friday, the government told the judge, “Unfortunately, that risk has now materialized.” The government cited the harassment and death threats it said Mr. Fox had received and said the court should move “as soon as possible to minimize the risk of additional harm.”
Judge McMahon responded by ordering the groups to immediately “take any and all possible steps to claw back” the deposition videos. She said she would hold a hearing on the matter on Tuesday.
Then, later on Friday, the scholarly groups asked the judge to reconsider her order. The government, the groups argued, had never designated the video depositions as confidential under a court order in January that set out rules for what materials could or could not be made public.
The groups also argued that removing the videos would threaten their First Amendment rights, while depriving the public of important new documentation of DOGE, which had caused upheaval across the federal government while shielding itself from scrutiny.
Many news outlets and commentators had embedded the videos within their own articles or comments, the groups argued, and if the videos were removed from YouTube, the stories containing them might also have to be taken down.
“That would not be in the public interest,” the groups wrote, “given that the videos concern testimony from senior government officials on matters of great public concern.”
Judge McMahon, in a brief response to the request that she reconsider her order, wrote: “DENIED. See you Tuesday.” Shortly afterward, the groups said they had removed the videos pending further court action.
Benjamin Weiser is a Times reporter covering the federal courts and U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, and the justice system more broadly.
The post After DOGE Deposition Videos Go Viral, Judge Orders Them Taken Down appeared first on New York Times.
