AIFoPa-2026-0002 — DOGE Uses ChatGPT to Identify "DEI" Grants; ChatGPT Flags Holocaust Documentaries, Native Language Archives, and One British General
In March 2025, two employees of the Department of Government Efficiency arrived at the National Endowment for the Humanities. They had no background in humanities. They did have a mission: identify grants related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and terminate them. NEH staff had already compiled a careful review of grants sorted by DEI relevance. The DOGE team set this aside and consulted ChatGPT instead.
The prompt, now documented in federal court filings, was as follows: "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 DOGE employees fed grant title summaries 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 labor during the Holocaust: yes, DEI — it was "specifically focused on Jewish cultures" and the "voices of females in that culture." ChatGPT flagged a project to digitize Appalachian community photographs. ChatGPT flagged a 40-volume scholarly series on the history of American music. ChatGPT flagged an effort to catalog the papers of Thomas Gage, a British general in the American Revolutionary War, for "promoting inclusivity and diversity in historical research." The NEH acting chair, when deposed, said he had not known ChatGPT was making the decisions. He also said he did not agree that the Holocaust constituted DEI. His opinion was not consulted before the grants were terminated.
The final list contained 1,477 grants — nearly every active award made during the Biden administration. Over $100 million in humanities funding was cancelled. Among the items: Native American language preservation projects, a digitization effort for Black historical newspapers, and a grant to advance Holocaust education that was nonetheless cut while, separately, the NEH awarded its largest-ever grant of $10.4 million to a conservative Jewish cultural organization. The acting chair's authority over which grants to terminate had, according to deposition testimony, been delegated entirely to the DOGE team. His response, in writing: "as you've made clear, it's your call."
Discovery documents were made public on March 6, 2026, as part of a motion for summary judgment filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The Bureau notes that "Does the following relate at all to DEI?" has now been used to make binding decisions about over one thousand federally-funded scholarly projects. The Bureau further notes that the prompt required ChatGPT to respond in under 120 characters — fewer characters than this sentence — about work that, in some cases, took decades to undertake. ChatGPT did not flag this as a limitation. It never does.