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’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was tasked with laying off thousands of public employees and radically cutting spending to reduce the federal deficit.
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Within days, all agencies were ordered to put DEI employees on furlough and related programs were shut down.
Musk also deployed DOGE to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provides critical financial support for research and arts programs. His staff then suddenly choked off more than 1,400 grants, eliminating tens of millions of dollars in public funding in less than a month.
Termination
The depositions came from a lawsuit filed by 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 in grant administration.
The American Historical Association, one of the plaintiffs, released Fox’s entire deposition YouTube pagein addition to the deposition of Fox’s boss at DOGE, Nate Cavanaugh.
What is revealed now?
Now the deposition videos of two DOGE employees — Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh — revealing that DOGE relied on ChatGPT to identify more than $100 million in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) grants that were later rescinded, ABC News reported.
Justin Fox said they don’t read books, but they turned to OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help discuss the thousands of grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
According to court filings, the men challenged ChatGPT by asking, “From the perspective of someone who wants to identify DEI grants, does that include DEI? Answer factually in less than 120 characters. Start with ‘Yes’.” o. “No.” a brief explanation follows. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your answer,” ABC news reported.
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Cavanaugh reportedly said they initially determined which grants could be cut based on whether they contained certain words — such as “DEI, DEIA, Equity, Inclusion, BIPAC, LGBTQ” — although the final decision on cuts rested with individual agency heads.
“Do you think it’s appropriate…?”
“Do you think it’s somehow inappropriate for someone in their 20s with no experience with federal government grants to personally judge what grants to cancel?” the lawyer asked the two men.
“Um, no. I don’t think it’s inappropriate,” Cavanaugh said. He even claimed that he did not need formal education or experience to make informed judgments.
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“So you’ve probably read some of these books that would tell you how to cancel a grant based on DEI,” the lawyer asked further.
“Um, I didn’t read a book on, um, how to tell if a grant involves DEI or not. I read the actual description of the actual grant,” Cavanaugh said.
The report cited depositions and legal documents as claims the men failed to provide a clear definition of DEI or take additional steps to ensure the decisions were not discriminatory.
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They argued that this was not necessary because the AI software was not the final decision maker.
“Have you done anything to ensure that ChatGPT’s perception of DEI as applied here does not discriminate based on gender?” asked the lawyer, raising another objection.
“It didn’t matter,” Fox said.
No goal was achieved, “no” regrets
In lengthy testimony, both Fox and Cavanaugh defended the funding decision, saying the cuts were necessary to reduce the deficit even though they never reached their goals.
They defended the DOGE’s efforts to cut “redundant agencies” as part of its attempt to reduce the federal deficit.
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“Don’t you regret that people may have lost an important income… to support their lives?” the lawyer asked Cavanaugh about canceling the grant.
“No. I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from $2 trillion to almost zero,” Cavanaugh replied, according to ABC News.
“Did you reduce the federal deficit?” asked the lawyer.
“No, no,” Cavanaugh said.
(With input from CBS News)
