A Manhattan judge on Monday ruled that the video depositions of two former employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency could be reposted on the internet, 10 days after they were temporarily taken down because of complaints that the former employees were being harassed.
The video depositions of the former DOGE employees and two other government witnesses, running nearly 25 hours, were posted this month on YouTube by scholarly groups that were suing the National Endowment for the Humanities, seeking to restore sweeping cuts in grants that DOGE helped to carry out last spring.
In her ruling, Judge Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court said the case involved “the public’s right to understand the operations of their government,” including the actions of DOGE.
The former DOGE employees, Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, each testified in the depositions that they had used ChatGPT to identify grants that were contrary to President Trump’s executive order banning “radical and wasteful government D.E.I. programs.” The men, both in their late 20s and recently recruited from jobs in technology and finance, said that they had no background in the humanities or government, but they believed in DOGE’s broader goal of shrinking “useless small agencies,” as Mr. Cavanaugh put it.
Clips from the videos began ricocheting across social media this month after a New York Times report on the case highlighted the depositions, which provided a rare direct glimpse into the inner workings of DOGE.
Numerous viral posts and news articles included withering 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 video clip, Mr. Fox was asked whether he agreed with ChatGPT’s flagging of a documentary about Jewish women who had been 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.”
In another clip, Mr. Cavanaugh described how projects had been placed on a list of “craziest” grants simply because they related to L.G.B.T.Q. subjects.
Although the clips drew widespread ridicule, some prominent figures defended the former DOGE employees. Mr. Musk reposted the clip of Mr. Cavanaugh, calling him “legendarily based,” adding a flexed bicep emoji.
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As the clips spread, the government asked Judge McMahon to order the groups to take down the videos, saying that Mr. Fox in particular had been subjected to significant harassment, including death threats. On March 13, the judge ordered them taken down temporarily while she considered the case.
In her ruling on Monday, Judge McMahon said the harassment of the witnesses was “deeply troubling.”
“It is highly inappropriate and should trouble every good citizen,” she wrote. But, she said, the government had not shown that an order barring the plaintiffs from reposting the videos would be effective.
“The videos have already been widely disseminated across multiple platforms,” she wrote, “including YouTube, X, TikTok, Instagram and Reddit, where they have been shared, reposted, and viewed by at least hundreds of thousands of users, resulting in near-instantaneous and effectively permanent global distribution.”
An order directed solely at the plaintiffs, Judge McMahon said, would not “meaningfully limit further dissemination or mitigate the government’s asserted harms.”
In the underlying lawsuit, which is still pending, the plaintiffs claimed that DOGE illegally took control of the National Endowment for the Humanities and carried out grant cuts that violated the First Amendment and the equal protection clause of the Constitution by targeting historical projects relating to particular groups.
The cuts, which ultimately expanded to include virtually every active grant approved during the Biden administration, threw many organizations and projects into disarray, causing some to shut down entirely.
The plaintiffs — the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association — said in a joint news release on Monday that they were glad the deposition videos, which they are reposting, would remain part of the publicly available historical record.
“The depositions in this case document what had not before been documented: how DOGE worked to silence projects that tell the American story,” Paula Krebs, the executive director of the Modern Language Association, said in a statement.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which represented the government, declined to comment.
In a March 17 court hearing about the government’s request to remove the videos, the judge expressed skepticism that any harassment of the DOGE employees was a problem the court could solve.
“Call law enforcement if people are being harassed,” Judge McMahon said.
And when a government lawyer suggested that some of the testimony was not intended “for the entire internet to see,” the judge responded: “Aren’t they proud of what they did? Aren’t they proud of the work that they did a year ago? Do they not stand behind what they did?”
In her decision on Monday, the judge noted that the government had not identified any particular portions of the videos that led to harassment or were likely to cause harm if they were publicly available.
“Unverified assertions about online harassment, untethered either to specific content or identifiable third-party actors,” she said, were not enough to justify forbidding the groups from posting the videos, particularly since transcripts of the depositions were also circulating.
The case, Judge McMahon said, involved a matter of clear public interest.
“The testimony in the videos,” she added, “concerns 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.”
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 Video Testimony of Former DOGE Employees Can Remain Online, Judge Rules appeared first on New York Times.
