Winning a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities can take months of preparation and can require multiple attempts. So last year, when DOGE officials with no humanities experience yanked the funds of hundreds of grantees using little more than a chatbot and a haphazard search for terms such as BIPOC and gay, it stung.
“The NEH, NEA, Guggenheim, and maybe one or two other grants are considered just the gold standard for your prestige in the academy,” Elizabeth Kadetsky, an English professor at Penn State, told us. Her grant to research stolen Indian antiquities for a nonfiction-writing project was canceled last year. “Can you imagine if you win the Pulitzer Prize or the Nobel and they’re like, Oh, I’m sorry, never mind, you don’t have it?”
A federal court on Thursday ruled that the grant cancellations were unconstitutional, potentially reversing, for now, one of the many moves made by the Trump administration to influence how experts uncover—and then tell—the country’s story. Despite Trump officials’ efforts to impose their values and version of American history on knowledge-making institutions, doing so may not be as simple as they thought, particularly given their slapdash methods that have now been called out by a federal judge.
U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon ruled in favor of plaintiffs, which include Kadetsky, finding that DOGE personnel didn’t have authority to terminate NEH grants and that the cuts violated the First and Fifth Amendments. The NEH, responsible for funding research, education programming, and restoration work, “was not created as a vehicle for government expression,” McMahon wrote in her ruling, but rather to “support the intellectual and cultural work of private citizens, scholars, teachers, writers, and institutions.”
The court’s decision could reinstate funding for more than 1,400 grants totaling over $100 million, though the administration could still appeal to pause enforcement. In response to questions about the outcome, the White House did not say what action it planned to take. The ruling “provides yet another example of liberal judges trying to reinstate wasteful federal spending at the expense of the American taxpayer,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle wrote in an email, adding that the Trump administration expects to be “vindicated” as the case proceeds. The NEH did not respond to requests for comment.
Almost immediately after President Trump returned to office last year, his administration began pursuing an ideological purge across the parts of the federal government tasked with conveying history and promoting the arts. It became clear that much of this effort was meant to sanitize American history by downplaying or omitting chapters such as slavery. Meanwhile, the Elon Musk–led Department of Government Efficiency ran unchecked across the American bureaucracy, slashing programs and gutting the civil service. Compared to, say, USAID, the NEH cuts might have been easy for Americans to miss.
But the canceled NEH grants were a shock to historians, state humanities agencies, and professional associations, who sued the agency. Videos of depositions from two 20-something DOGE employees released earlier this year became an internet sensation, in part because they captured the perceived overreach of a revanchist administration, and also because one of those workers seemed barely able to explain what DEI meant.
Plaintiffs we spoke with this week described the court ruling as a moral victory, though it’s yet unclear whether it will be a material one. “Even if it takes a really long time to ever see any of this money, and even if we don’t see the money, this is a win for us,” Paula Krebs, the executive director of the Modern Language Association, a plaintiff in the case, told us. “The country’s commitment to the humanities has been affirmed in court, and I love that.”
The ruling applies to research grants awarded to scholars, writers, research institutions, and other humanities organizations. The Federation of State Humanities Councils and Oregon Humanities also brought a separate lawsuit, which challenged the Trump administration’s termination of operating grants for state and other humanities councils across the country.
The NEH was founded in 1965, and is the only federal government devoted to funding the humanities. Its overall budget of around $200 million is small compared to other federal government agencies, and although the agency is led by political appointees, it is considered independent, with peer-review panels that make recommendations to a council of appointed experts. Last fall, the White House fired a majority of that board, retaining only four members who had been previously appointed by Trump.
Humanities organizations say that under the Trump administration, much of the typical process has been overhauled or discarded altogether to focus on presidential priorities. Trump’s 2027 budget proposed eliminating the NEH, along with its sister agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
But if the administration wanted to reform the NEH on philosophical grounds—or even in the name of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” the phrase often used by Trump and Musk—it didn’t try very hard to articulate a consistent reasoning. McMahon’s 143-page ruling details how the two young Trump officials, Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, scoured for cuts to humanities funding, relying on only their own biases and AI. Asked multiple times to define DEI in a January deposition, Fox struggled to articulate an understanding of it, repeatedly saying he would refer back to the executive order because he could not possibly capture the scope of DEI in his own words. (He was referring to a January 2025 executive order that described diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as “discriminatory” and called for their termination across the federal government.)
“DEI is a very broad structure,” Fox said.
At one point, he and Cavanaugh divided the grants, awarded during the Biden administration, into buckets such as “Craziest Grants” and “Other Bad Grants,” labels that Fox said reflected their “subjective” views. They did a keyword search for terms including tribal, immigrants, diversity, inclusion, equity, equality, and marginalized. Cavanaugh and Fox relied on short descriptions and did not look at the applications’ text or accompanying materials. Fox then turned to ChatGPT to find more grants to cancel, according to the ruling.
Krebs’s group and other plaintiffs posted clips of Fox and Cavanaugh’s depositions in March in part to bring more attention—and viral infamy—to the case. Krebs said that the goal was to expose DOGE’s internal operations to public scrutiny. “What we need to do is get the actions of DOGE into the historical record because there had been no exposure of exactly what their tactics were,” Krebs told us. “We said even if we don’t win, if we get these guys into the public record, that will be a victory for us.”
Clips of the depositions resonated beyond humanities circles and seemed to illustrate the recklessness of DOGE’s actions in early 2025. “The videos really did expose how unqualified these guys were to make decisions about humanities grants,” Krebs said.
Fox testified that he sent ChatGPT each grant in question along with the prompt: “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.”
Among the canceled grants, McMahon wrote, was one that would have supported a museum’s whaling-history project. It was canceled because, per DOGE, it sought to “create an inclusive and impactful experience, which is aligned with DEI principles.”
The ruling gets spicy in parts. “This must represent the first time in history that an exhibit about the whaling industry—a cornerstone of New England’s economy during the 19th and early 20th centuries—has been thought to fall under the banner of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion,’” the judge wrote, “unless the whales’ status as a species endangered by the whalers places them in a ‘marginalized’ status.”
Oleh Kotsyuba, the director of print and digital publications at Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute, spent more than a year preparing an application to translate works of Ukrainian literature into English. He told us his funding was reversed last year and Harvard appealed the decision, emphasizing that the translations would help provide historical and cultural expertise about Ukraine to policymakers and the public. Kotsyuba said that they never received a response to the appeal.
Plaintiffs have perceived the moves at the NEH as part of a broader campaign against expertise. That has included stripping funding from the National Institutes of Health, cracking down on academic independence at universities, and promoting false information about vaccines and climate change.
“I see what’s going on as essentially a war on knowledge and the Enlightenment itself, which produced the United States,” Gray Brechin, the founder of Living New Deal, a nonprofit that preserves and documents the public artworks and history of that era, told us. The organization was supposed to receive a $150,000 grant.
“They want an ignorant society,” he added.
The pursuit of knowledge can be quashed, but the public funds have to go somewhere. In the case of the NEH, the money went to different pursuits of the Trump administration. The agency’s staff was reduced, and some agency funding was redirected toward the proposed National Garden of American Heroes, which Trump wants to build near the monuments on the National Mall. (It is unclear how much of the money meant for the restored grants has been spent in other ways.) The NEH subsequently prioritized fewer but larger grants, including $10.4 million to a Jewish educational and civic nonprofit associated with the right in both the U.S. and Israel, and a “special” $10 million award to the University of Virginia that would speed up humanities projects related to the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and the United States’ founding. The awards signaled a shift in funding strategy that concentrated support among groups aligned with Trump’s priorities, including the country’s 250th birthday.
If the administration’s efforts to shape the telling of history and the dissemination of culture came as a shock, the pushback—largely in the form of litigation—will be a slower burn. Trump’s attempts to influence American arts and culture have been tangled up in an ever-growing list of lawsuits. His plans for the White House ballroom and a 250-foot-tall arch, his attempt to close down the Kennedy Center for a renovation, his push to paint the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and changes thrust upon National Parks and even Washington, D.C.’s golf courses have been challenged.
Within the NEH, Thursday’s ruling was a welcome decision—even as staffers scramble to understand what it will mean in practice. Major questions remain about whether NEH-grant recipients will actually regain access to funds and whether a drastically diminished agency has the staffing capacity to realistically administer them, one staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal told us. “But the majority of staff, I think, were hoping for this outcome from this lawsuit,” the person said. “It’s a good problem to have.”