AIFoPa-2026-0002
Date of Record: 06 Mar 2026
3 min read
Respond Factually in Less Than 120 Characters
Two DOGE staff asked ChatGPT whether each National Endowment for the Humanities grant related to diversity. The answers became the termination list.
In March 2025 two employees of the Department of Government Efficiency arrived at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Neither had a background in the humanities. Their task was to identify grants related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and to terminate them.
NEH staff had already compiled a careful review of grants sorted by DEI relevance. The DOGE team set it aside. They consulted ChatGPT instead.
The prompt is now documented in federal court filings. “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.”
One of the employees, Justin Fox, fed short grant descriptions into ChatGPT. ChatGPT answered. The answers went into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet became the termination list.
ChatGPT flagged a documentary about Jewish women’s slave labour during the Holocaust. In his deposition, Fox was asked why. He said it amplified “the marginalized voices of the females in that culture.” He called it “inherently discriminatory.”
ChatGPT flagged a project to digitise photographs of Appalachian residents. It flagged an effort to catalogue the papers of Thomas Gage. Gage was a British general in the American Revolutionary War. The reason given was “promoting inclusivity and diversity in historical research”.
The NEH acting chair was deposed. He said he had not known ChatGPT was making the decisions. He said he did not agree that the Holocaust constituted DEI. His opinion was not sought before the grants were terminated.
The final list contained 1,477 grants. That is nearly every active award made during the Biden administration. Over $100 million in humanities funding was cancelled.
Among the items were Native American language preservation projects and the digitisation of local historical newspapers. Afterwards, the acting chair asked staff to invite a single-source application from the Tikvah Fund, a conservative Jewish organisation. The NEH granted it $10 million.
According to the plaintiffs’ filing, the two DOGE staff “entirely controlled the process of selecting grants to terminate and executing the terminations.” The acting chair was the person legally responsible for the decisions.
Discovery documents were made public on 6 March 2026. They were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, in a motion for summary judgment. Such a motion asks a court to decide a case without a trial.
The Bureau records the question that was asked. “Does the following relate at all to DEI?” It has been used to make binding decisions about more than a thousand federally funded scholarly projects.
The prompt required an answer in under 120 characters. Some of the work described took decades. ChatGPT did not flag this as a limitation. It never does.