DOGE's ChatGPT-driven mass grant purge deemed illegal in scathing order

A federal judge ruled against President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency on Thursday, finding that the group's mass cancellation of National Endowment for the Humanities grants was illegal — and that a key part of the process relied on ChatGPT.

DOGE, partly the brainchild of tech billionaire Elon Musk when he was advising the Trump administration, promised to find and reform government waste and make federal agencies run a leaner operation — something that the project failed to do in terms of federal spending.

A key part of the case, noted Meryl Kornfeld of The Washington Post, turned on the fact that DOGE officials asked ChatGPT to determine what grants were part of "DEI" (diversity, equity, and inclusion) projects, and canceling them on that basis — which U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon found to be an illegal basis for revoking grants.

The judge was scathing about the reliability of ChatGPT as a tool for making consequential federal funding decisions.

"The record reflects that these ChatGPT determinations were generated without any additional context beyond the cursory spreadsheet descriptions themselves," wrote McMahon. "Given what courts now know about the hallucinatory propensities of ChatGPT and similar generative-AI tools, it would hardly be surprising if ChatGPT inferred, from DOGE’s repeated requests, that Fox and Cavanaugh were looking for reasons why grants could be characterized as DEI — and therefore terminable — and supplied 'rationales' simply in order to satisfy the user’s perceived demand. The utter lack of reasoning behind so many of its 'rationales' certainly suggests as much."

As a result, McMahon issued a sweeping permanent injunction ordering the grants reinstated.

"Accordingly, Defendants are permanently enjoined from enforcing or giving effect to the Mass Termination of NEH grants at issue in this action," wrote McMahon. "Defendants shall rescind the termination notices issued pursuant to the Mass Termination and shall treat those notices as without legal effect. Defendants shall not reallocate, obligate, or otherwise dispose of funds associated with those awards on the basis of the Mass Termination or the unlawful grounds adjudicated in this Opinion and Order."

The judge was careful to note, however, that the ruling does not require immediate payment of funds.

"For the avoidance of doubt, nothing in this injunction or in the Court’s prior preliminary relief requires the immediate payment of grant funds, adjudicates any contractual entitlement to money, or prevents NEH from administering grants prospectively in accordance with lawful statutory authority, applicable grant terms, and the Constitution," the order added.