A federal judge has ruled that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency “blatantly used” race, gender, and other protected characteristics to execute the largest mass termination of federal grants in the history of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and she is not mincing words about what she found.
U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon issued her ruling on Thursday, declaring the terminations unlawful, finding that DOGE staffers lacked the legal authority to make those decisions, and blocking the Trump administration from carrying out the grant cuts.
The ruling is a significant legal rebuke of DOGE’s methods and adds to a growing body of court decisions pushing back on the administration’s approach to federal spending cuts.
The case centers on how DOGE executed its review of National Endowment for the Humanities grants. According to depositions from two former DOGE staffers made public earlier this year, the review process relied on ChatGPT and a list of DEI-related keywords, including “DEI, DEIA, Equity, Inclusion, BIPOC, LGBTQ”, to flag grants for termination. Judge McMahon found that process not only inadequate but discriminatory.
“Treating Black civil-rights history, Jewish testimony about the Holocaust, the oft-forgotten Asian American experience, the shameful treatment of the children of Native tribes, or the mere mention of a woman as a marker of lack of merit or wastefulness is not lawful,” U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon stated.
Judge McMahon found that the DOGE review process “did not conform to, or even resemble, NEH’s ordinary grant-review process”, meaning the cuts were not made through any legitimate evaluation of the grants’ merit or impact, but rather through a keyword-driven process that systematically targeted grants based on their subject matter and the communities they served.
Among the grants cut was funding for research on Jewish women who survived Nazi persecution. Judge McMahon called that decision out specifically, citing the current resurgence of antisemitism in the United States.
“At a time when the specter of antisemitism has reemerged from the shadows, for our Government to deem a project about Jewish women disfavored because it centered on Jewish cultures and female voices is deeply troubling,” Judge Colleen McMahon stated.
The ruling makes clear that the protected characteristics of the communities served by these grants, Black Americans, Jewish Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, women, functioned as the actual criteria for termination. That is not efficiency. That is discrimination. And a federal judge has now said so on the record.
The depositions at the center of this case paint a revealing picture of how DOGE operated inside the National Endowment for the Humanities. Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, two DOGE employees with backgrounds in tech and finance, neither of whom had worked in government before joining DOGE, described a process built around keyword searches and AI tools rather than any substantive review of what the grants actually funded or who they served.
When pressed in deposition about whether they felt any regret about people who may have lost income as a result of the cuts, Cavanaugh’s response was unambiguous.
“No. I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from $2 trillion to close to zero,” Cavanaugh shared.
When the attorney followed up by asking whether DOGE had actually reduced the federal deficit, Cavanaugh admitted it had not.
The nonprofits that brought the suit, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Modern Language Association, are celebrating the ruling as a vindication of the humanities and of the communities whose stories DOGE attempted to defund.
The Trump administration is expected to appeal. The ruling stands for now.
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