DOGE Bro’s Grant Review Process Was Literally Just Asking ChatGPT ‘Is This DEI?’
from the the-chatgpt-presidency dept
Federal grants that had been approved after a full application and review process were terminated by some random inexperienced DOGE bros based on whether ChatGPT could explain—in under 120 characters—that they were “related to DEI.”
That’s what the newly released proposed amended complaint from the Authors Guild against the US government reveals about how DOGE actually decided which National Endowment for the Humanities grants to kill.
There were plenty of early reports that the DOGE bros Elon Musk brought into government—operating on the hubristically ignorant belief that they understood how things worked better than actual government employees—were using AI tools to figure out what to cut. Now we have the receipts.
The bros in question here are Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox who appeared all over the place in the early DOGE days, destroying the US government.
Cavanaugh was appointed president of the U.S. Institute of Peace after DOGE took over, though that position is affected by this week’s court ruling. Shortly after being named the acting director of the Interagency Council on Homelessness — one of the agencies Trump’s budget proposal calls for eliminating — Cavanaugh placed its entire staff on administrative leave. Cavanaugh first emerged at GSA in February, where he met with many technical staffers and software engineers and interviewed them about their jobs, according to four GSA employees who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation. Since then, he’s also been detailed to multiple other agencies, according to court filings, including the U.S. African Development Foundation (USADF), the Inter-American Foundation (IAF), the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Minority Business Development Agency. Cavanaugh’s partner in much of the small agency outreach is Justin Fox, who most recently worked as an associate at Nexus Capital Management, according to his LinkedIn profile.
As far as I can tell, Cavanaugh is a college dropout who founded a startup to do IP licensing management, that has gone through some trouble. We’ve mentioned Cavanaugh here before, for the time when he was head of the US Institute for Peace, and Elon and DOGE falsely labeled a guy who had worked for USIP a member of the Taliban, causing the actual Taliban to kidnap the guy’s family. Fox, as noted, was a low rung employee at some random private equity firm. Neither should have any of the jobs listed above, and don’t seem to know shit about anything relevant to a government role.
Anyway, as the Authors Guild figured out in discovery, when these two inexperienced and ignorant DOGE bros were assigned to cut grants in the National Endowment for the Humanities, apparently Fox just started feeding grant titles to ChatGPT asking (in effect) “is this DEI?” From the complaint:
To flag grants for their DEI involvement, Fox entered the following command into ChatGPT: “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. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.” He then inserted short descriptions of each grant. Fox did nothing to understand ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” as used in the command or to ensure that ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” matched his own.
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