In May of last year, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the American Historical Association (AHA), and the Modern Language Association (MLA) filed a lawsuit in federal district court in an attempt to reverse DOGE’s cuts to the the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). These cuts eliminated entire divisions and programs, which included grants.
As a result of the lawsuit, two employees at DOGE, Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh were deposed. Videos of those hours-long depositions with Musk’s DOGE employees have just been uploaded to YouTube.
So, how did Elon Musk’s government agency determine what to cut? They asked ChatGPT.
“Does the following relate at all to DEI?” is the prompt DOGE regularly used, giving the AI chatbot further direction to make things as simple for them as possible, the employees revealed.
The DOGE employees inducted [sic] to provide a “yes” or “no” answer with an explanation that was shorter than 120 characters.
During the deposition, Fox provides a stunning omission that DOGE made in weeding out programs it decided were DEI.
DOGE would search programs and grants to cut using terms such as “Black,” “gender,” “LGBTQ+,” and “equality.” However, DOGE would not search for cuts from anything involving terms like “caucasian” and “heterosexual.”
Fox made $150,000 while working with DOGE. Cavanaugh made $120,000.
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