@davejorgenson: New testimonies with two former DOGE employees highlights their use of ChatGPT to cancel grants related to DEI. Last March, two employees from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency arrived at the agency with the mandate of canceling previously approved grants that ran afoul of President Trump’s agenda. But instead of looking closely at funded projects, they pulled short summaries off the internet and fed them into the A.I. chatbot. The prompt was simple: “Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’” The results were sweeping, and sometimes bizarre. A documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust? The focus on gender risked “contributing to D.E.I. by amplifying marginalized voices.” Even an effort to catalog and digitize the papers of Thomas Gage, a British general in the American Revolution, was guilty of “promoting inclusivity and diversity in historical research.” The DOGE employees did not appear to question ChatGPT’s judgments, and continued hunting for unacceptable projects. Two weeks later, they sent a master list of 1,477 problematic awards — nearly every active grant made during the Biden administration — to Michael McDonald, the endowment’s acting chairman. In a joint motion filed on Friday, the plaintiffs — the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and the Authors Guild — argue that DOGE illegally took control of the agency and carried out cuts that violated the First Amendment and the equal protection clause of the Constitution. While the cancellations were sweeping, the filing argues, they were driven by a campaign against D.E.I. that discriminated on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender and other characteristics. Caption from article by Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times.

Dave Jorgenson 🕺

Open In TikTok:

Region: US

Wednesday 11 March 2026 20:30:20 GMT