Winning the grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities can take months of preparation and may require multiple attempts. So last year, when DOGE officials with no human experience took the money of hundreds of grantees using nothing more than chat and random searches for terms like. BIPOC and gayit hurt
“The NEH, the NEA, the Guggenheim, and maybe one or two other grants are considered the gold standard for your honors in college,” Elizabeth Kadetsky, a professor of English at Penn State, told us. His grant to research stolen Indian antiquities for a non-fiction writing project was canceled last year. “You can imagine if you win a Pulitzer Prize or a Nobel and they’re like, Oh, sorry, don’t worry, you don’t?”
A federal court on Thursday ruled that the cancellation of the subsidy was unconstitutionalwhich could change, for now, one of the many steps taken by the Trump administration to influence how experts reveal—and then tell—the country’s story. Despite Trump officials’ efforts to impose their values and version of American history on knowledge-making institutions, doing so may not be as easy as they thought, especially given their slapdash tactics that have now been called out by a federal judge.
U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, Kadetsky among them, finding that DOGE staff did not have the authority to terminate NEH grants and that the cuts violated the First and Fifth Amendments. The NEH, responsible for funding research, educational programs, and restoration work, “was not created as an instrument of government expression,” McMahon wrote in his decision, but rather “to support the intellectual and cultural work of individual citizens, scholars, teachers, writers and institutions.”
The court’s decision could restore funding for more than 1,400 grants totaling more than $100 million, although the administration could still appeal the stay. In response to questions about the findings, the White House did not say what action it plans to take. The decision “provides yet another example of independent judges trying to recover federal abuses at the expense of American taxpayers,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle wrote in an email, adding that the Trump administration expects to be “vindicated” as the case progresses. NEH did not respond to requests for comment.
Almost immediately after President Trump returned to office last year, his administration began implementing a purge of ideology in all parts of the federal government tasked with presenting history and promoting the arts. It was clear that many efforts were aimed at sanctifying American history by reducing or eliminating aspects such as slavery. At the same time, the Department of Government Efficiency headed by Elon Musk was out of control in the American bureaucracycutting programs and disrupting public service. Compared to, say, USAIDThe NEH cuts may be easy for Americans to miss.
But the canceled NEH grants were a shock to historians, government humanitarian agencies, and professional associations, who sued the agency. Deposit videos from two 20-something DOGE employees provided earlier this year went viral online, in part because they captured the apparent abuse of the revenge regime, and also because one of the employees seemed to be able to explain what DEI meant.
Plaintiffs we spoke to this week described the court’s decision as a moral victory, although it is not yet clear whether it will be a moral one. “Even if it takes a very long time to see this money, and even if we don’t see the money, this is a win for us,” Paula Krebs, executive director of the Modern Language Association, a plaintiff in the case, told us. “The country’s commitment to humanity has been proven in court, and I love that.”
The decision applies to research grants awarded to academics, authors, research institutes and other humanitarian organizations. The Federation of State Humanities Councils and Oregon Humanities also brought a different casewhich challenged the Trump administration’s suspension of operational funding for government and other humanitarian agencies across the country.
The NEH was founded in 1965, and is the only agency of the federal government dedicated to funding the humanities. Its total budget of approximately 200 million dollars it is small compared to other federal government agencies, and although it is led by political appointees, it is considered independent, with peer review panels that make recommendations to a panel of appointed experts. Last year, the White House fired most of the board, leaving only four members who had previously been appointed by Trump.
Humanitarian organizations say that under the Trump administration, much of the normal process has been modified or thrown out entirely to accommodate the president’s priorities. Trump’s 2027 budget proposed eliminating the NEH, along with its sister agencies, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
But if the administration wanted to reform the NEH on philosophical grounds—or even in the name of “embezzlement, fraud and abuse,” a phrase often used by Trump and Musk—didn’t really try to make a solid argument.” McMahon’s 143-page decision describes how Trump’s two junior officials, Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, sought to cut humanitarian funding, relying solely on their own biases and AI. Asked several times in Fox to clarify he struggled to explain his understanding, saying he would often refer back to the executive order because he could not capture the scope of the DEI in his own words. (He was referring to a January 2025 main order (which defined diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as “discriminatory” and called for them to be stopped in the federal government.)
“DEI is a very broad structure,” Fox said.
At one point, he and Cavanaugh divided the grants, which were awarded during the Biden administration, into buckets such as “Excessive Grants” and “Other Bad Grants,” labels that Fox said reflected their “core” views. They did a search for keywords including tribal, immigrants, diversity, integration, equality, equalityand to be separated. Cavanaugh and Fox relied on brief descriptions and did not look at the program text or accompanying materials. Fox then turned to ChatGPT for more cancellation grants, according to the judgment.
Krebs’ group and other plaintiffs released clips of Fox’s and Cavanaugh’s statements in March in part to bring more attention — and viral notoriety — to the case. Krebs said that the goal was to expose DOGE’s internal operations to public scrutiny. “What we need to do is get DOGE’s actions on the historical record because there was no disclosure of what their tactics were,” Krebs told us. “We said even if we don’t win, if we put these people on the public record, that will be a victory for us.”
The comment sections were heard beyond humanitarian circles and seemed to show the incompetence of DOGE’s actions in early 2025. “The videos revealed how unqualified these people are to make decisions about humanitarian grants,” Krebs said.
Fox testified that he sent ChatGPT each grant in question along with a questionnaire: “Do the following have anything to do with DEI? Answer correctly in less than 120 characters. Start with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation.”
Among the canceled grants, McMahon wrote, was one that would have supported the museum’s whaling history project. It was canceled because, according to the DOGE, it sought “to create an integrated and effective application, which is in line with the principles of the DEI.”
The decision gets spicy in parts. “This must represent the first time in history that a show about the whaling industry—the mainstay of New England’s economy in the 19th and early 20th centuries—has been considered under the banner of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion,'” the judge wrote, “unless the whales’ status as endangered and ‘silent’ relegates them to inferior whale status.”
Oleh Kotsyuba, director of digital publications at Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute, spent more than a year preparing requests to translate works of Ukrainian literature into English. He told us his funding was revoked last year and Harvard appealed the decision, insisting that the translations would help provide historical and cultural expertise about Ukraine to policymakers and the public. Kotsyuba said that they never received a response to the appeal.
Plaintiffs have seen the actions at the NEH as part of a broader campaign against expertise. That includes denying them funding National Institutes of Healthsuppress academic freedom in universities, and promote false information about coverage and climate change.
“I see what is going on as a war against knowledge and the Enlightenment itself, which produced America,” Gray Brechin, founder of Living the New Deala non-profit organization that preserves and preserves public works of art and history of the era, told us. The organization was to receive a $150,000 grant.
“They want a community of idiots,” he added.
The seeks knowledge it can be repealed, but public money has to go somewhere. In the case of the NEH, the money went to different activities of the Trump administration. The agency’s staff was cut, and some of the agency’s funding was diverted to the proposed National Park for American Heroes, which Trump wants to build near the monuments on the National Mall. (It is not known how much of the money intended for the restored grant has been used in other ways.) NEH later prioritized fewer but larger grants, including 10.4 million dollars for a non-profit Jewish educational and civil rights organization in the United States and Israel, and a “special” $10 million awarded to the University of Virginia that would accelerate humanitarian projects related to the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and the founding of the United States. The awards marked a shift in fundraising strategy that targeted support among groups defined by Trump’s priorities, as well as the country’s 250th birthday.
If the administration’s efforts to create a narrative of history and popularize culture came as a shock, the push — especially in the form of a lawsuit — will be a slow burn. Trump’s attempts to influence American art and culture have been mired in a growing list of court cases. His plans for Palace ballroom and a 250-foot long bow, his attempt to close it The Kennedy Center for renovations, his push to paint the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and changes brought to National Parks and even golf courses in Washington, DC have been challenged.
Inside the NEH, Thursday’s decision was a welcome one—even as staff struggled to understand what it would mean in practice. Major questions remain about whether NEH grant recipients will regain funding and whether the severely depleted agency has the staffing capacity to effectively manage them, said one staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “But many employees, I think, were expecting this outcome from this case,” the person said. “It’s a good problem to have.”
