Federal Court Strikes Down DOGE's Chaotic NEH Grant Cancellations

A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration's mass cancellation of National Endowment for the Humanities grants was unconstitutional, potentially restoring more than 1,400 grants worth over $100 million. U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon found that DOGE personnel had no authority to terminate the grants and that the cuts violated both the First and Fifth Amendments. The ruling is a significant setback for the administration's effort to reshape how American history and culture are researched and told.

The method behind the cancellations turned out to be extraordinarily haphazard. Two 20-something DOGE staffers — Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh — sorted grants into buckets labeled 'Craziest Grants' and 'Other Bad Grants,' ran keyword searches for terms like 'tribal,' 'immigrants,' 'marginalized,' and 'equity,' and then Fox fed individual grants into ChatGPT with the prompt: 'Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters.' Fox admitted the categorizations were 'subjective,' and when pressed in a January deposition to define DEI, he repeatedly said he couldn't capture its scope in his own words. Deposition clips went viral after plaintiffs released them in March.

Judge McMahon's 143-page ruling did not hide her exasperation. She noted that a canceled grant supporting a museum's whaling-history exhibit had been flagged for promoting an 'inclusive and impactful experience' — and quipped that this may be the first time whaling, a cornerstone of New England's 19th-century economy, has been classified as a DEI initiative, 'unless the whales' status as a species endangered by the whalers places them in a marginalised status.' A Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute project to translate Ukrainian literature into English — prepared over more than a year and potentially valuable to policymakers navigating the Russia-Ukraine war — was also canceled with no response to an appeal.

Meanwhile, NEH funds didn't disappear — they were redirected. The agency's staff was gutted, and money was steered toward Trump-aligned priorities: a proposed National Garden of American Heroes near the National Mall, a $10.4 million grant to a right-leaning Jewish civic nonprofit, and a $10 million 'special' award to the University of Virginia for projects tied to the Declaration of Independence and the American founding. Trump's 2027 budget proposes eliminating the NEH entirely, along with the NEA and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

The White House dismissed the ruling as the work of 'liberal judges reinstating wasteful federal spending' and said it expects to be vindicated on appeal. Whether grantees will actually recover funds remains uncertain — NEH is now so understaffed that even sympathetic staffers inside the agency are uncertain it has the capacity to administer a reinstatement. Still, plaintiffs called it a moral victory. Paula Krebs of the Modern Language Association said that even if the money never materializes, getting DOGE's internal tactics into the public and legal record was itself a goal — and one they achieved.