josh buermann @buermann@mastodon.social
Public

DOGE delegated gutting $100M from the National Endowment for the Humanities to ChatGPT, then Trump's acting chairman redirected the money to pet causes and personal friends, with $10M going just to Elliott Abrams' Tikvah Fund, amounting to an eight figure taxpayer grant to the neoconservative movement that Trump allegedly ran against and now serves.

archive.is/9kCcq

The ChatGPT prompt was simple: “Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’” The results were sweeping, and sometimes bizarre. Building improvements at an Indigenous languages archive in Alaska risked “promoting inclusion and diverse perspectives.” Renewal of a longstanding grant to digitize Black newspapers and add them to a historical database was “D.E.I.” So was work on a 40-volume scholarly series on the history of American music. A documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust? The focus on gender risked “contributing to D.E.I. by amplifying marginalized voices.” Even an effort to catalog and digitize the papers of Thomas Gage, a British general in the American Revolution, was guilty of “promoting inclusivity and diversity in historical research.” The DOGE employees did not appear to question ChatGPT’s judgments, and continued hunting for unacceptable projects. Two weeks later, they sent a master list of 1,477 problematic awards — nearly every active grant made during the Biden administration — to Michael McDonald, the endowment’s acting chairman. Mr. McDonald, a veteran of the agency, agreed to let DOGE terminate them, creating what he later described as a “clean slate” for Mr. Trump’s “America First” agenda. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/arts/humanities-endowment-doge-trump.htmlAgency staff members, in response to an executive order by Mr. Trump banning diversity initiatives across the government, had already created spreadsheets rating all grants made during the Biden administration as having high, medium, low or no “D.E.I. involvement.” Instead of drawing on those evaluations, court documents show, the DOGE team used ChatGPT to start making its own.Over the past year, Mr. McDonald has guided the agency in that direction. In January, it announced $75 million in new grants, including more than $40 million in large awards to conservative-backed civic thought centers and classical humanities institutes that have been established at or near some campuses, to combat the liberal tilt of academia. Many of the awards went to handpicked recipients who had been invited to apply, outside the agency’s tradition of open, competitive calls for proposals. The court documents shed some light on the origins of one large grant that has drawn particular scrutiny: a $10.4 million award — the largest in the agency’s history — to Tikvah, a conservative Jewish educational organization, for a broad project promoting the study of Jewish civilization and Western culture. Asked by the plaintiffs’ lawyers why Tikvah, which had never applied for a federal grant, was tapped for such a large uncompetitive award, Mr. Wolfson said Mr. McDonald had been impressed by an episode of its podcast and asked him to reach out. Asked about any personal connections with Tikvah, Mr. Wolfson said his wife had previously been involved with a program there, and is currently the managing director of a separate foundation established by a former Tikvah board chair.
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