March 14 2026, 08:15 
A staffer who worked under Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) admitted that he and another staffer eliminated federal humanities grants simply because they referenced the LGBTQ+ community.
The staffer, 28-year-old Nathan Cavanaugh, made the admission during a January deposition as part of a federal lawsuit brought by the American Historical Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Modern Language Association. The lawsuit, filed last May, seeks in part to restore National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant funding canceled by DOGE.
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The organizations argue that “DOGE staffers violated the Federal Equal Protection Clause of the 5th Amendment by flagging grant descriptions as ‘DEI’ solely because they included ‘BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color),’ ‘homosexual,’ ‘LGBTQ,’ and ‘Tribal,’ among other terms.”
In video testimony released by the plaintiffs, Cavanaugh essentially admitted to doing just that.
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According to the original complaint, Cavanaugh and another DOGE staffer, Justin Fox, were assigned to review Biden-era NEH grants as part of the department’s efforts to “dismantle” the independent federal agency in accordance with President Donald Trump’s anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) executive order. The lawsuit alleges that Cavanaugh and Fox personally terminated nearly 1,500 grants using a nongovernmental email account and without processing the terminations through NEH’s grants management system as required by internal agency policies.
During his sworn deposition, Cavanaugh admitted to having no experience in scholarly peer review and that decisions to cancel NEH grants were made entirely based on his and Fox’s personal judgement about what constituted DEI-related programs.
“I think a person can have enough judgment from reading books and being well-informed outside of traditional experience to make judgment calls about obvious things like a grant that literally lists DEI in its description,” Cavanaugh testified, before admitting that he had not read any books that informed his decision about what grants to cancel.
In a motion for summary judgement filed last week, the organizations note that Fox admitted in his sworn deposition that he used ChatGPT to identify “all active NEH grant descriptions containing keywords like ‘gay,’ ‘BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color),’ ‘indigenous,’ ‘tribal,’ ‘melting pot,’ ‘equality,’ and similar terms,” which he flagged as “Craziest Grants” and “Other Bad Grants.”
Cavanaugh admitted that the “craziest grants” were those which in his and Fox’s view “were most obviously in violation” of the president’s executive orders. He admitted that they based those determinations solely on brief descriptions of the grants.
Over two dozen LGBTQ+-related grants were among those flagged as “craziest,” according to The Independent. During Cavanaugh’s deposition, attorneys for the plaintiffs read descriptions of some of those grants, including one for a project examining the experience of LGBTQ+ people in the U.S. military and another looking at HIV/AIDS in American prisons. Cavanaugh admitted that the grants were canceled because they referenced the LGBTQ+ community as well as “feminist and queer insights.”
Asked what he considered “crazy” about studying LGBTQ issues, Cavanaugh responded, “Nothing on its surface, but it’s craziest in its egregiousness of the violation” of Trump’s executive order.
The Independent notes that Fox testified that he earned $150,000 working for DOGE and Cavanaugh said he earned $120,000. Both testified that their actions were justified by cutting government spending. Cavanaugh expressed no regret, describing the canceled grants as “wasteful and unnecessary” in the context of “a $2 trillion federal deficit.”
“You don’t regret that people might have lost important income?” attorneys asked.
“No,” Cavanaugh responded. “I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from $2 trillion to close to zero.”
Asked whether DOGE had in fact reduced the federal deficit, Cavanaugh admitted that the agency had not.
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