Update on DOGE:
A federal judge just delivered a devastating ruling against DOGE, finding that Elon Musk’s operation “blatantly used” race, gender, and other protected characteristics to carry out the largest mass termination of federal grants in the history of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Over 1,400 grants representing more than $100 million in congressionally appropriated funds were wiped out. And the method DOGE used to do it is almost too absurd to believe two staffers recruited from tech backgrounds through Elon Musk’s allies fed grant descriptions into ChatGPT and asked it “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.” That was the entire review process. No scholars consulted, no peer review, and no subject-matter expertise. Just a chatbot and an ideological keyword list.
That keyword list included terms like “DEI, DEIA, Equity, Inclusion, BIPOC, LGBTQ” and anything that tripped the filter was terminated. Among the grants ChatGPT flagged was an anthology titled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” a collection of short fiction by Jewish writers from the Soviet Union. The AI classified it as DEI because it explored Jewish writers’ engagement with the Holocaust. The NEH’s own acting chairman testified he didn’t believe the grant was DEI-related or wasteful and DOGE overruled him and cancelled it anyway.
Judge McMahon also noted that given what courts now know about AI’s tendency to hallucinate, it’s entirely possible ChatGPT was simply generating “rationales” to satisfy what it perceived the user wanted to hear.
Judge Colleen McMahon called it what it was. “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,” she wrote. She called the whole scheme a “textbook example of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination,” ruled it violated both the First Amendment and the equal protection clause of the Fifth Amendment, and found that DOGE had no legal authority to make any of these decisions in the first place.
She also called it “deeply troubling” that at a moment of rising antisemitism, the government had deemed projects about Jewish women disfavored because they centered on Jewish culture and female voices.
The judge ordered the government to rescind its termination letters though the ruling doesn’t force immediate payment of the funds. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
This is what happens when you hand unchecked power over public institutions to people who have no understanding of (or respect for) what those institutions actually do.
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