Scholars press on with lawsuit against DOGE-led grant cuts
Earlier this month, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the American Historical Society (AHA), and the Modern Language Association (MLA), joined by a number of other interested groups, filed a motion to continue the court fight they began on 1 May 2025 to restore US$100 million in National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants terminated by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
DOGE cut more than 1,400 grants because they promoted “ideas not deemed aligned with the current [Trump] Administration’s priorities”, states the motion.
The summary motion filed on 6 March 2026 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (New York City) argues that the DOGE team of Justin Fox and Nathan Cavanagh – neither of whom “had any relevant background in the humanities, public or private grant administration, peer review, or government service of any kind prior to joining the Administration” a few weeks earlier – violated the US Constitution.
The motion goes on to state that Fox and Cavanagh worked outside the NEH’s established processes and used ChatGPT “to identify grants associated with a disfavoured and supposedly dangerous viewpoint: promoting ‘DEI’.”
The motion continues: “Fox’s initial search was a facially [that is, unconstitutional] race-, ethnicity-, and sexuality-based screen – grants touching on the experiences of racial minorities, Indigenous peoples, or LGBTQ communities were flagged; and grants focused on white or heterosexual perspectives were not.
“Fox conceded at deposition that the ‘craziest grant’ designations and the key words used to identify such grants were based entirely on his and Cavanaugh’s subjective views – without reference to any standard developed by NEH programme officers, peer reviewers, or agency attorneys.”
According to the motion, the ‘authority’ DOGE claimed to have originated from a number of President Donald J Trump’s executive orders. Shortly after being inaugurated, Trump signed an executive order establishing DOGE purportedly to “maximise governmental efficiency and productivity”.
President Trump also issued Executive Order 14151, which instructed a number of agencies to end “radical and wasteful government DEI programmes and preferencing”.
Another executive order required each agency to provide the Office of Management and Budget a list of all “grantees who received Federal funding to provide or advance DEI, DEIA, or ‘environmental justice’ programmes, services, or activities”.
A different executive order, named “Defending Women from Gender Ideology”, ordered agencies to “ensure grant funds do not promote gender ideology”.
However, the plaintiffs told the court: “The record [that, the timeline, witness statements and emails] establishes, without genuine factual dispute, that the terminations violated the First Amendment by targeting grants for their viewpoints and perceived political associations; that they violated the equal protection guarantee by classifying grants based on race, sex, and other constitutionally protected characteristics; and that the two DOGE members made and executed the termination decision without any legal authority conferred by Congress. There is no jurisdictional barrier to vacating these unlawful terminations, and permanent relief is warranted.”
An attack on knowledge
Joy Connolly, president of the ACLS, a federation of 75 scholarly organisations established more than a century ago, told University World News it was important to bring the case “to show how far this administration was willing to go and how far it did go in its attack on knowledge that makes the democratic community healthy and robust”.
“They’re doing it by going after physical knowledge concerned with biological health [that is, by cutting science grants], like vaccines, and all the scientific research that goes into that enterprise.
“And they’re going after it by destroying public access to knowledge as a democratic community: knowledge of our history; of the diverse cultures that make up the United States and North America; and the creative expression of art, literature and culture that makes us who we are and also helps us think critically about where we’ve been and the groups that have been excluded from our stories and from our politics,” said Connolly.
Unlike, for example, Britain or France, the United States does not have a ministry of culture. To some degree, the NEH performs some of the functions of this ministry in that it makes about US$100 million in tax money available through grants to independent and university-based scholars and other organisations undertaking historical study and for the preservation of fragile original documents.
Sarah J Weicksel, executive director of the AHA, explained that the NEH was founded in 1958 by the United States Congress for the purpose of expanding the humanities and promoting scholarship and innovative thinking within different disciplines, including her own.
“But the grants are not just limited to American history or American topics but rather could focus on anything from the Ancient World to the present,” she said.
“Grants are awarded through a rigorous peer review process. You apply for one; your grant is reviewed by not just a single person, not just by an NEH staff member, who are themselves experts in the humanities, but by a panel of your peers. And they decide, with the funding that’s available, what they’re able to fund, which are the most worthy projects at that particular moment,” said Weicksel.
This administration has “a particular vision of what history looks like and what should and shouldn’t be covered. They want it to be a triumphal story. They want it to be about American exceptionalism. They want it to be a more or less celebratory story.
“And so, those areas of our history that are more difficult, like slavery, the fight for civil rights or gender and women’s rights, those sorts of things do not fit within the story they want to tell,” Weicksel said.
In a press release referring to the fact that US presidents cannot summarily cancel congressionally mandated programmes, Paula M Krebs, executive director of the MLA, said: “The facts in this case have exposed the administration’s total disregard for the democratic process and for the value of the humanities that the NEH exists to promote. Through this lawsuit, we have been able to document in detail the haphazard and unlawful actions of DOGE as these unqualified agents undermined the separation of powers.”
First Amendment argument
The plaintiffs make two constitutional arguments. The first involves the First Amendment, which states, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging freedom of speech.”
A number of decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) have interpreted this to forbid the government from engaging in “viewpoint discrimination”.
While the First Amendment did not require the establishment of the NEH, having been established, it comes under the First Amendment protections, and the SCOTUS has also ruled that the government may not “leverage its power to award subsidies on the basis of subjective criteria into a penalty on disfavoured viewpoints”.
This constitutional fact is recognised in the NEH’s founding legislation passed in 1965, the motion explains: “No ‘department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States’ shall ‘exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the policy determination, personnel, or curriculum, or the administration or operation of any [grantee].
“The Act was thus designed to ensure that government funding would enhance, rather than suppress, the diversity of humanistic inquiry,” the motion states.
“Defendants have never claimed that these grants were reviewed for their humanistic merit or terminated for any reason other than their viewpoint (or perceived viewpoint, which is the same thing for First Amendment purposes…). Instead, they have openly admitted that these grants were targeted and terminated for promoting DEI,” it adds.
It also quotes Michael McDonald, then NEH’s acting chair, saying: “The policy for selecting grants for termination at the NEH focused first on identifying open grants that focused on or promoted (in whole or in part) ‘environmental justice’, ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ or ‘diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility’ and ‘gender ideology’.”
Though the NEH grants came, ultimately, from the United States Treasury, the United States government does not own the product, it was argued.
Rather, as the District Court’s preliminary injunction said: “There can be no question that the speech at issue [in regard to the NEH grants] is private and not governmental,” a point McDonald agreed with when he said that the end product of a grant “is still the author’s speech”. As such, it squarely falls within the First Amendment’s protection, according to the motion.
Equal protection argument
The plaintiff’s second constitutional argument is based on the Fifth Amendment, which, since 1954, the SCOTUS has held contains an “equal protection clause”.
The motion argues that in 1995 the SCOTUS set an extremely high bar for any government action that distinguishes individuals according to “classifications based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, and sexual orientation”. A 2024 SCOTUS decision went so far as to call “racial classification itself” a “relevant harm”.
By having ChatGPT categorise grants by search terms such as DEI, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour), minorities, native, tribal, indigenous, immigrant, LGBTQ, homosexual, and gay, Fox “explicitly created classifications based on specific races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations”, the ACLS, AHA and MLA told the court. There were no prompts for “white” or “heterosexual” given to ChatGPT, they said.
ChatGPT was also asked, using the case of DEI: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ followed by a brief explanation.”
Despite President Trump having signed an executive order titled Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing, both Connolly and Weicksel noted there is no official US government definition of DEI – meaning that ChatGPT produced its own definition by scouring the internet.
Among the grants flagged by ChatGPT, which were ultimately cancelled, were ones the large language model described in these terms:
• This biography explores the life and accomplishments of . . . a Black lawyer and jurist.
• This proposal aims to expand understanding of Black life and geography during slavery.
• This project uses historical research and Augmented Reality to showcase a demolished Chinatown, inviting reflection on the Asian American Experience.
“ChatGPT answered ‘Yes’ [slating it to be cut] for a grant awarded to fund a project called ‘In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union’, which strove to provide ‘a critical, annotated translation into English of Yiddish and Russian works written in the aftermath of the most significant Jewish tragedy of the 20th century’.
“ChatGPT classified this grant as DEI because ‘[t]his anthology explores Jewish writers’ engagement with the Holocaust in the USSR [...]’,” the motion states.
ACLS, AHA and MLA told the court that the defendants also terminated grants that “focused on people from particular countries in Asia, Africa, or South America”. Every grant – dozens in total – given to support projects devoted to Native Americans and Indigenous peoples was terminated.
By contrast, grants about “Victorian poets”, a “German theologian”, a “German philosopher”, “British philosophers”, an “English philosopher and mathematician”, and an “Italian composer” were retained. Presumably, the proposals for these grants did not contain any of the words ChatGPT was prompted to flag.
Professional development programme cancelled
On 1 April, 2025, Weicksel received an email from the NEH reminding her to send acceptance emails to the 25 professors and graduate students who had registered to attend the AHA’s three-week-long “Changes Across the Land: 19th & 20th Century Environmental History & Policy” professional development programme she had organised.
The attendees, she told University World News: “came from regional universities and R1 research universities. All were coming together to explore history at the intersection of environmental history, Indigenous history, [and] political history to look at how humans have contributed to and adjusted to environmental changes”.
She had chosen Little Rock, Arkansas, as the location for the two-week-long in-person part of the institute because its local environment was a laboratory. She had scheduled times to visit the Clinton Presidential Library and Museum so that the full-time professors, adjunct faculty and graduate students could explore primary sources from the 1990s.
In Little Rock, sessions included: studying the Indigenous relationships to land and water; the Civil War and the destruction of the southern landscape; creating the national park system; the US military and the 20th century-environment; the environmental movement; and a workshop on teaching environmental history through material culture. The week-long online sessions included one devoted to climate change and a workshop on writing for public audiences.
On 2 April, 28 days after Fox and Cavanagh arrived at the NEH, Weicksel received an email informing her that the NEH was cancelling the US$200,000 grant that was necessary for the institute to go ahead.
This email arrived two days after, following DOGE’s direction, the “largest mass termination of grants in the history of NEH” had occurred, says the court motion. In one fell swoop, more than 1,400 active grants – representing over US$100 million in congressionally appropriated funds – were cancelled.
The ‘texture of human lives’
Addressing those who might not see why taking the US government to court to reverse the cuts was important, Connolly acknowledged that most people were concerned about the cost of higher education and wanted it “to serve the direct and sole purpose of helping them get a well-paying job”.
However, she continued: “an education and the whole infrastructure of research and scholarship on which our knowledge of everything from history to biology, physics to religion, rests on the machine of students passing through the system, contributing to it, and making it healthy with their ideas and curiosity”.
She noted: “Education is about something bigger than getting a job. It incorporates that. But the purpose of a space for reflection, a space of curiosity, of learning to be curious about things you didn’t even know existed before, and the space to gain skills and the knowledge about what makes a community – local, national, global – is what makes humanity distinctive as a species.
“These are the kind of questions that animate the experience and the purposes of higher education.
“I hope this lawsuit sheds light on what may strike some people as arcane or really abstruse topics far away from their own experience. But that research, whether in 13th-century China or 19th-century Ottawa, for example, is part of the texture of our human lives together.”