Newly released deposition videos reportedly offer a never-before-seen look at two members of Elon Musk’s team responsible for the largest mass termination of federal grants last year.
When President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were tasked with firing thousands of public employees and radically cutting spending to reduce the federal deficit.
Within days, all agencies were directed to put DEI staff on leave, and related programs were shuttered.
Musk had also deployed DOGE into the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provides vital financial support to research and arts programs. His staff had then abruptly choked off more than 1,400 grants, eliminating tens of millions of dollars in public funding within less than a month.
The deposit
The depositions stemmed from a lawsuit from the Modern Language Association, the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Historical Association.
It included testimony from two young DOGE officials, Justin Fox and Nathan Cavanaugh, neither of whom had experience working in government, let alone grant administration.
The American Historical Association, one of the plaintiffs, put Fox’s entire deposition on its youtube pagein addition to the deposition of Fox’s boss at DOGE, Nate Cavanaugh.
What’s revealed now?
Now, videos of the deposition of two DOGE employees — Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh — reveal that DOGE relied on ChatGPT to identify more than $100 million in grants related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that were later canceled, ABC News reported.
Justin Fox said they did not read books but turned to OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help sift through the thousands of grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
According to court filings, the men prompted ChatGPT by asking, “From the perspective of someone looking to identify DEI grants, does this involve DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ o. ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response,” ABC news reported.
Cavanaugh reportedly said they originally determined which grants could be cut based on whether they included certain words — like “DEI, DEIA, Equity, Inclusion, BIPAC, LGBTQ” — though the final decision about cuts was up to the head of individual agencies.
‘Do you think it’s appropriate…?’
“Do you think it’s inappropriate in any way that someone in their 20s with no experience with grants for the federal government was making personal judgment calls about what grants to cancel?” an attorney asked the two men.
“Um, no. I don’t think it’s inappropriate,” Cavanaugh was quoted as saying. He even argued that he did not need formal education or experience to make informed judgments.
“So presumably you read some of these books that would have informed you on how to cancel a grant based on DEI,” the attorney further asked.
“Um, I did not read a book, um, on how to discern whether a grant includes DEI or not. I read the actual description of the actual grant,” Cavanaugh said.
The report cited the depositions and legal documents as claiming that the men did not provide a clear definition for DEI or take additional steps to ensure the decisions were not discriminatory.
They argued that it was not necessary because AI software was not the final decision-maker.
“Did you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT’s perception of DEI as applied here wouldn’t discriminate on the basis of sex?” an attorney asked, prompting another objection.
“It didn’t matter,” Fox said.
No goal achieved, ‘no’ regrets
In lengthy depositions, both Fox and Cavanaugh defended the funding decisions, arguing the cuts were necessary to reduce the deficit, though they never achieved their goals.
They defended DOGE’s effort to cut “useless agencies” as part of its attempt to reduce the federal deficit.
“You don’t regret that people might have lost important income… to support their lives?” an attorney asked Cavanaugh about the grant cancellations.
“No. I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from $2 trillion to close to zero,” Cavanaugh responded, according to ABC News.
“Did you reduce the federal deficit?” the attorney asked.
“No, we didn’t,” Cavanaugh said.
(With inputs from ABC news)
