DOGE Bros Had More Fun Burning Down Government Than Testifying About It

None of this would have been legal if they’d sent competent adults. But the fact that they sent smirking little shits makes it so much worse.

Nate Cavanaugh chewing gum at his deposition

In the spring of 2025, the Elon Musk’s DOGE slashed and burned through various congressionally-created and -funded federal agencies, systematically destroying them as part of an effort to … well, who the hell knows. Something-something deficit. Blahblahblah waste, fraud, and abuse. Eradicate DEI!

Musk’s code bros knew they had a mandate from the White House and force field that made them immune to any law or regulation. And so, armed with nothing more than their laptops and unbridled arrogance, they set out to hack the federal government to pieces.

On March 12, the code monkeys descended on the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent agency established by Congress in 1965 to “foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.”

Which is a little on the nose, to be honest.

For six decades, NEH fulfilled its congressional mandate to support historical and cultural research through mostly small-dollar grants, dispersed after an intensive application and peer-review. NEH has funded Ken Burns documentaries, Pulitzer Prize-winning literature, and a mountain of scholarship that mattered, even if didn’t turn a profit.

None of that interested Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, the 20-something tech bros dispatched to raze the agency. They’d never worked in government or the humanities, and they didn’t know didn’t know the First Amendment from the Administrative Procedure Act.

They had, however, heard about the deficit. And they knew about DEI, which the president supposedly banned by executive order his first day back in the White House.

Present at the destruction

New York Times reporter Jennifer Schuessler has meticulously documented the destruction since the beginning, and the lawsuits filed by the Authors Guild and the American Council of Learned Societies supply thousands of pages of firsthand accounts. But there’s something about seeing a callow young man blank out when asked why he destroyed so much that really brings home the mindless destruction of this campaign.

Fox and Cavanaugh instructed NEH staff to rate the agency’s active grants for the presence of DEI, “gender ideology,” and “environmental justice.” When this failed to yield enough cuts, Fox and Cavanaugh turned to ChatGPT, feeding it the database of grants and instructing it to flag anything that relates to DEI.

A $349,000 grant to replace the HVAC system at the High Point Museum in North Carolina was DEI because, according to ChatGPT, it “enhances preservation conditions for collections, aligning with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences.” A documentary about the Colfax Massacre — the 1873 slaughter of Black Louisiana freedmen, one of the bloodiest atrocities of Reconstruction — was canceled “because it focuses on exclusively anti-Black violence, which is a race.” A project to digitize local newspaper archives was nixed because digital accessibility “aligns with DEI goals of inclusivity and representation.” A documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust was flagged as DEI because it focused on gender and religious oppression.

In short, every bit scholarship or art involving anyone who wasn’t white, male, and able was cut.

On April 1st, termination notices went out, informing more than 1,400 grantees that their funding was being terminated immediately to allow the agency to redirect the funds “in furtherance of the president’s agenda.” Despite grant language allowing for appeals, the letter warned that there was no recourse because “adherence to the traditional notification process is not possible.” Three days later, Fox and Cavanaugh placed 80 percent of NEH employees on administrative leave.

Awful and unlawful

If all this sounds wildly illegal, that’s because it is.

Congress has the power of the purse, and it allocated $207 million to NEH for fiscal year 2025, with $192 million designated for grants. The president and his henchmen may believe in their hearts that Congress’s appropriations are wasteful, but they can’t just decide not to spend the money — although the Supreme Court has certainly gone out of its way to suggest that maybe they can.

Arbitrarily canceling grants for no reason and denying grant recipients the review process they’ve been promised clearly violates both due process and the Administrative Procedure Act. Discriminating against grantees because they are non-white, or women, or LGBTQ+ violates the Equal Protection Clause. And targeting grantees for the content of their speech is a textbook First Amendment violation.

And so, in July, Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York granted the Authors Guild plaintiffs a partial preliminary injunction. By then, it was clear that the Supreme Court was going to allow the government to treat all grantees like creditors, forcing them to line up for a refund at the Court of Federal Claims. But the Trump administration was threatening to obligate the money elsewhere — that is, spend the money on something else — so that it would never be available to grantees.

That’s what Judge McMahon enjoined:

While I cannot order that the withdrawn grant funding be paid out, I can certainly direct that those funds not be re-obligated pendente lite — essentially, I can enter an order that these funds be “escrowed” until we can hold a trial. Enjoining the re-obligation of funds means that money will be available should (for example) the Government conclude that the better part of valor is to conduct a constitutionally compliant “do over” — a process that could lead to the reinstatement of some or all of the grants.

That “do over” never happened. Instead, the defendants spent six months doggedly trying to bury the evidence of what they’d done. They claimed attorney client privilege, deliberative process privilege, executive privilege — virtually everything except marital privilege!

This stonewalling cut zero mustard with Judge McMahon, who ordered discovery “all the way up to the White House and down to the NEH and every place in between, including this entity known as DOGE.” In a handwritten memo endorsement (it’s a New York thing), she wrote: “I am quite tired of your discovery disputes. The documents MUST BE PRODUCED by Monday, even if Monday is a federal holiday. I will not modify the schedule for briefing purposes in this letter, as I have already signed off on it. PS - I am not interested in further argument. Produce the documents now.”

But, like everyone else in this administration, the DOGE bros can’t produce their communications because they did so much of it over Signal, ensuring that messages would immediately disappear into the ether. This violates the Federal Records Act and is currently the subject of a motion for sanctions because they clearly spoliated evidence in anticipation of litigation.

On March 6, 2026, the plaintiffs filed a motion for summary judgment. But even if they win, it won’t un-make this catastrophe. The scholars whose work was canceled, whose book projects were interrupted mid-chapter, who took leave from their jobs for projects that never materialized, whose tenure is now in jeopardy will never get that back.

Irony is dead

When he was deposed this January, Fox said he joined DOGE “to work with other hardworking people and address the spending deficit.” But of course, the deficit has ballooned under Trump. DOGE saved no money at all, although it did manage to withhold several hundred million dollars of congressionally mandated spending.

And yet, Fox insisted his work was at least somewhat successful:

I think having somebody check to see where taxpayer dollars were going that was an unbiased third-party auditor of commonsense approach to spending has never happened before in the history of the government, and now we've established that it's possible.

I do feel it was a success in the sense that people will be more understanding that these aren't just numbers on a page, that they add up into something that's bigger than what they're working on. And I think that, in that way it was successful.

A 26-year-old commerce major used ChatGPT to upturn thousands of people’s lives, and he says it was all worthwhile because he proved that the dollars spent “aren’t just numbers on a page.” The mind boggles.

Of course, the money has to be spent on something, and so NEH went looking for recipients who aren’t “DEI.” Current projects focus on George Washington, Mark Twain, and Flannery O’Connor — great Americans, but hardly ones who lack for scholarly investigation.

And, in its largest single grant ever, NEH recently awarded $10.4 million to the Tikvah Fund, a conservative Jewish organization with ties to the agency’s current leadership, “to combat the normalization of anti-semitism in American society by focusing on the study of Jewish civilization.” The outside scholarly council voted not to recommend it, but Michael McDonald, NEH’s acting head who cooperated with Cavanaugh and Fox, overruled them.

Clearly the Tikvah Fund grant wouldn’t have passed the ChatGPT “DEI” test, but intellectual consistency was never the point of this exercise. This was an act of wanton destruction by proudly ignorant young men, who neither know nor care about the law, or history, or even basic civics.

As ACLS President Joy Connolly put it: “Our lawsuit reveals this administration’s contempt for that principle and for public investment in research for the common good. DOGE employees’ use of ChatGPT to identify ‘wasteful’ grants is perhaps the biggest advertisement for the need for humanities education, which builds skills in critical thinking.”

NOTE: This post has been updated. Longer video of Nate Cavanaugh has been replaced with a shorter clip.