Judge Orders DOGE to Restore Over $100 Million in Canceled NEH Grants

US District Judge Colleen McMahon issued a 143-page ruling on May 8, 2026, declaring that the Department of Government Efficiency’s cancellation of over $100 million in grants was unconstitutional. The decision restores federal grants that were shut down for ‘DEI’ prejudice and orders the reversal of more than 1,400 canceled NEH grants.

The ruling stems from a 2025 lawsuit filed by humanities groups against the cancellations at the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Judge McMahon found that DOGE’s elimination of the grants was unlawful, citing violations of the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection, and DOGE’s lack of authority. DOGE’s process for eliminating grants involved using ChatGPT to determine if something is related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Justin Fox, a DOGE staffer, worked with colleague Nate Cavanaugh to eliminate 97 percent of grants under the NEH.

Fox testified that he used ChatGPT to highlight why a grant may relate to DEI and to pull out anything related to DEI. He submitted each cursory grant description from the NEH spreadsheet to ChatGPT using the standardized prompt: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters.

Fox testified that he did not define “DEI” for ChatGPT and that he did not have the slightest idea how ChatGPT understood the term. Justin Fox asked ChatGPT to scan NEH grants for “Detection Codes” related to protected characteristics. ” DOGE used the mere presence of particular, protected characteristics to disqualify grants from continued funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

DOGE deemed hundreds of grants wasteful because they related to Blacks, women, Jews, Asian Americans, and Indigenous people. The subjects DOGE treated as markers of waste are subjects that Congress made expressly germane to NEH’s mission. Some grants labeled wasteful related to projects about the Holocaust, civil rights, and an educational experience exploring indigenous knowledge, culture, and climate.

Judge McMahon wrote that there is no distinction to be drawn here between the Government and ChatGPT. “ChatGPT was the Government’s chosen instrument for purposes of this project,” Judge McMahon stated in the ruling. She added that there is not a scintilla of evidence that Fox or Cavanaugh undertook any meaningful review of whether the ChatGPT rationale made sense.

The Verge reported that Judge McMahon pushed back on the government’s argument that any viewpoint-based classification was ChatGPT’s doing rather than the Government’s. The ruling restores the grants after DOGE had relied on artificial intelligence as its primary screening method without human oversight of the outputs.