DOGE used ChatGPT to cut humanities grants, affecting Oregon researchers and museums

This article was written by Evan Watson & KGW:

EUGENE, Ore. — Depositions released as part of a federal lawsuit reveal that employees from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency used brief ChatGPT prompts to slash more than a thousand National Endowment for the Humanities grants last spring, wiping out funding for research projects and cultural institutions across Oregon and the country.

The cuts, which eliminated roughly 97% of the then-appropriated humanities grants, affected Oregon projects ranging from Indigenous history exhibits and climate research to library renovations and gun violence studies. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are seeking to restore the funding.

Depositions from DOGE staffers, filed as part of the lawsuit, show workers asked ChatGPT whether grant projects were related to diversity, equity and inclusion. They did not define DEI in their prompts and limited responses to 120 characters. 

One staffer repeatedly struggled to define DEI during his deposition, ultimately deferring to the language of President Trump's executive order, which also did not define the term.

"Well, (DEI is) exactly what was written in the EO," said Justin Fox, a DOGE employee.

When asked whether he had any regret about the mass termination of grants, DOGE employee Nate Cavanaugh acknowledged that the actions didn't reduce the federal deficit, despite that being the stated goal.

"I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from 2 trillion dollars to close to zero," Cavanaugh said in his deposition. "Did you reduce the federal deficit?" he was asked. "No, we didn't."

In addition to the DEI query, DOGE also targeted grants that had received funding during the Biden administration, regardless of their subject matter.

The Oregon impact

At the University of Oregon, English professor Mattie Burkert was six months into a multi-year NEH grant to expand the London Stage Database — a free, publicly accessible online portal compiling 52,000 nights of theater records that span 140 years of London's history. 

The grant to grow the resource, which had attracted scholars, genealogists, historians and data journalists, required a year of preparation and more than 50 pages of application materials, plus a competitive process and scrutiny from five peer reviewers.

Her grant was terminated by the DOGE team.

"These were grants that were awarded incredibly competitively on the basis of extensive expert peer review," Burkert said, referring to the revelations in court documents. "Of course, I find it incredibly concerning."

This week, out of curiosity, Burkert tested if artificial intelligence would recommend grant cuts if it had been provided with that context and information.

"I actually asked Claude yesterday whether I could ask it to help me make some decisions about whether to terminate some federal grants," she said. "The answer I got was, no, you really should not, that is not an appropriate use case for a large language model because of context and expertise and regulations."

She noted the inconsistencies in the limited ChatGPT review. While her research was not flagged as being "related to DEI," a similar project from another researcher — seeking to create a mapping database — was flagged.

"The chatbot flagged it as, yes, it's DEI, because this could enhance our understanding of issues of inclusion in early modern London," she said. "The prompts did not actually provide a working definition of what was meant by DEI or what it would mean for a project to be related to DEI."

The University of Oregon provided bridge funding to help Burkert continue a reduced version of her work.

Burkert praised the university's help, saying humanities grants, while small relative to the overall federal budget, deliver outsized value to the general public.

"These grants far over-deliver in terms of the value that they offer to our shared public and civic life, far beyond the really relatively small financial investment that's being made by the American people," Burkert said.

Multiple other University of Oregon professors are listed as having lost funding via the NEH cuts.

Changes in the high desert

In Bend, the High Desert Museum lost $750,000 across five grants, according to executive director Dana Whitelaw, who has led the museum for 12 years.

The cuts impacted funding for an exhibit on the plateau's indigenous peoples and a project documenting how climate change is affecting the high desert and its people and animals, among other initiatives. The museum was forced to rescind a job offer to a University of Oregon graduate as a result.

Whitelaw said the impacts will compound over time.

"What we lose with these dollars is the documentation of our humanity and our communities," Whitelaw said. "We lose the ability to hire an ethnographer, an anthropologist, to go out into rural Oregon and collect stories of how climate change is impacting their communities."

One canceled grant would have made the museum's vault, which holds nearly 30,000 objects, more fire-resilient — a pressing concern given the wildfire risk in the region.

Whitelaw said the effects won't be immediately visible to museum visitors but will be felt for generations. 

"We're not going to feel that right now," she said. "We're going to feel it a couple of decades from now. Our job is to be collecting the stories of today for the curators and visitors of tomorrow."

A political process?

The NEH's acting director, Michael McDonald, said in his deposition that in his experience of more than two decades at the agency, only a handful of appropriated grants had ever been terminated. 

In those cases, recipients had failed to meet requirements or complete the work, McDonald said, cutting grants for political reasons is highly unusual.

Burkert said established processes exist for changing agency funding priorities, but they were bypassed entirely. 

"There are circumstances under which grants can be terminated and processes to do so," she said. "I think in this case, none of those processes were followed."

She said the swift purge showed a lack of careful deliberation.

The Oregon Coast Aquarium and the Portland Art Museum also had NEH grants canceled, though both institutions told KGW they had fortunately already drawn their funds before the terminations took effect, as their projects were near completion.

Burkert said she hopes the episode prompts a broader reckoning. 

"Maybe it can renew our attention to and our care for the role of the humanities in our public and civic life," she said.