March 17, 2026
Chatbot justice, comment-section court
Turns Out the DOGE Bros Who Killed Humanities Grants Are Sensitive About It
ChatGPT bros axed history grants—then freaked when the internet laughed
TLDR: Two ex-“DOGE” staffers used ChatGPT to help cancel NEH humanities grants, then had their depositions pulled from YouTube—triggering an online pile-on. Commenters blasted the chatbot decision-making, mocked the takedown as a backfire, and demanded transparency, saying history shouldn’t be deleted by a prompt.
The internet saw the depositions, and the internet did not hold back. After two young “DOGE” staffers admitted they fed National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant summaries into ChatGPT to flag “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion), commenters turned the outrage up to 11—and the memes up to 100. When the videos were yanked from YouTube, the comment sections went feral, calling it a censorship faceplant and a classic Streisand effect.
The biggest shock? Projects reportedly targeted included Holocaust-era women’s histories, Black newspaper digitization, Indigenous language archives, even a Revolutionary War figure’s papers. Commenters summed it up as: “Who needs historians when you’ve got a chatbot?” Others joked these were “Magic 8-Ball governance” vibes, renaming the office the “Department of Guessing Everything.”
Drama-wise, two camps emerged. The vocal majority mocked the “alpha disruptor” swagger crumbling under public scrutiny, demanding the tapes be mirrored and receipts preserved. A smaller crew asked whether any grants actually conflicted with policy, but even they winced at the ChatGPT shortcut. Meanwhile, folks dunked on the evasive “What even is DEI?” answers—cue endless “define DEI in 120 characters” memes.
Links to 404 Media and the New York Times flew around as people pieced together the saga. The vibe? Equal parts fury and farce. If the goal was to purge “DEI,” critics say, the result was deleting history—then deleting the evidence. And the internet is not done watching.
Key Points
- •Three scholarly organizations sued NEH over DOGE’s mass cancellations of humanities grants and uploaded four witness depositions to YouTube.
- •Depositions focused on former DOGE operatives Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh and how they chose grants to terminate.
- •Fox used ChatGPT with a concise DEI prompt to evaluate grant descriptions; he adopted the tool on his own as an “intermediary step.”
- •Examples flagged as DEI included projects related to Indigenous archives in Alaska, Black newspapers digitization, American music history, Holocaust scholarship, and Thomas Gage’s papers.
- •The government later had the deposition videos removed from YouTube, and Fox struggled to define DEI, deferring to a Trump executive order he could not recall in detail.