Federal grants approved through full review processes were terminated by inexperienced DOGE bros using ChatGPT to determine if projects were "DEI-related." The Authors Guild's amended complaint reveals that Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox fed grant titles into ChatGPT asking "is this DEI?" in under 120 characters, then canceled hundreds of humanities grants without proper review.

Cavanaugh, a college dropout who founded an IP licensing startup, and Fox, a low-level private equity associate, were detailed to multiple agencies including the National Endowment for the Humanities. They created keyword lists targeting terms like "LGBTQ," "tribal," and "BIPOC" while excluding terms like "white" or "heterosexual." Actual NEH experts were blocked from challenging these terminations.

Their ChatGPT prompts flagged grants about the Colfax massacre, Jewish women's Holocaust labor, Native American boarding schools, and Black female WWII pilots. The two sorted grants into "to cancel" and "to keep" lists, with no DEI-related grants surviving. They even sent termination notices from private email servers to over 1,400 recipients. This reckless AI-driven cancellation process demonstrates how inexperienced political operatives used automation to gut humanities funding based on superficial DEI detection.