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Look, I get it. Government waste is real. Bureaucratic bloat is real. The desire to have a federal government that spends taxpayer money wisely and operates without unnecessary friction? That’s a pretty standard and quite reasonable desire in American politics. So when Elon Musk showed up promising he could cut $2 trillion in federal spending by bringing the vaunted “efficiency” of the tech world to the government, a lot of people — not just MAGA diehards, but regular people who’d spent time cursing at a federal website built in 2003 or waiting on hold with the DMV — thought: sure, maybe give it a shot. A decade of fawning tech press coverage about Elon Musk will do that to your priors.
We now have the receipts on how that went. And they’re absolutely damning.
Let’s start with the most basic question: did DOGE save the government money? Because that was, you know, apparently the whole point (or so we were told).
The answer, as the Times bluntly puts it:
But the group did not do what Mr. Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.
Spending went up. Musk promised $2 trillion in cuts during the campaign, started walking that back almost immediately after the election, and the actual result was that the government spent more money. The entire exercise was supposed to pay for itself many times over. Instead, the taxpayer funded an $81 million operation that produced negative returns.
But DOGE had that website — the “Wall of Receipts” — proudly tallying up all those billions in savings, right? About that. The Times went through the 40 largest items on DOGE’s claimed savings list:
In DOGE’s published list of canceled contracts and grants, for instance, the 13 largest were all incorrect.
At the top were two Defense Department contracts, one for information technology, one for aircraft maintenance. Mr. Musk’s group listed them as “terminations,” and said their demise had saved taxpayers $7.9 billion. That was not true. The contracts are still alive and well, and those savings were an accounting mirage.
Together, those two false entries were bigger than 25,000 of DOGE’s other claims combined.
Of the 40 biggest claims on DOGE’s list, The Times found only 12 that appeared accurate — reflecting real reductions in what the government had committed to spend.
Two fake line items on a spreadsheet claimed more “savings” than 25,000 other entries combined. Of the 40 biggest claims, 28 were wrong. The 13 biggest were all wrong. The very first day the “Wall of Receipts” went live, its largest claim was an $8 billion Department of Homeland Security contract that was off by a factor of 1,000 — the contract was actually worth $8 million, as many folks reported at the time. That’s the kind of error that would get you fired from an introductory accounting course, and these were the people supposedly bringing precision and transparency to the federal government.
The accounting trick DOGE relied on most heavily is worth understanding, because it reveals whether this was mere incompetence or something more deliberate. The Times explains that in many cases, DOGE simply lowered the “ceiling value” of contracts — the theoretical maximum the government could spend, not what it was actually spending — and then claimed the full difference as “savings.” A defense contractor CEO explained this perfectly to stock analysts:
This summer, CACI’s chief executive, John Mengucci, told stock analysts that the change was meaningless.
“It doesn’t change a thing for this company,” he said. His company had always expected to be paid about $2 billion over the contract’s life span. And even if the contract ever did reach the ceiling, he said, the Pentagon could just raise it again.
“There’s no reduction of revenue,” Mr. Mengucci said.
Or to put it in even more understandable terms:
“Does lowering the maximum limit on your credit card save you any money?” said Travis Sharp, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which studies federal spending. “No, it does not.”
The core of DOGE’s operations was to manufacture pretend statistics so that Musk and friends could claim savings that weren’t real. It was how DOGE manufactured the appearance of progress while delivering essentially nothing. After DOGE initially claimed $55 billion in savings, the website’s own documentation only supported $16.5 billion. Media analysis then showed half of that was a single data entry error (that $8 billion instead of $8 million). A Politico analysis found DOGE had cut only $1.4 billion in actual spending — and even that money couldn’t reduce the deficit because it would be returned to agencies that were legally obligated to spend it. More than one-third of DOGE’s contract cancellations yielded no monetary savings at all.
The Garcia report traces a trajectory that any honest observer should find embarrassing:
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Elon Musk claimed he could reduce the federal deficit by eliminating “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending, promising the destruction of the American social safety net. He began walking back these goals after President Trump’s election victory. In early 2025, Mr. Musk appeared on a variety of conservative-leaning podcasts and media outlets baselessly claiming that fake or stolen Social Security numbers led to more than $500 billion in fraud. Media analysis classified Mr. Musk’s claims about waste and fraud in the federal government as lacking evidence or misleading, saying that he misconstrued Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports or lacked basic understanding of the contracts in question.
So: $2 trillion, then $1 trillion, then $55 billion claimed, then $16.5 billion documented, then $1.4 billion confirmed, then spending went up anyway. That’s quite a trajectory for something that was sold as bringing Silicon Valley precision and efficiency to government.
Okay, fine — DOGE didn’t save much money. But did it at least make the government run better? Did it cut red tape, speed things up, make services less awful?
No. It did the opposite. And this is the part that should really bother anyone who genuinely wanted government reform.
The Garcia report documents in excruciating detail how DOGE’s “efficiency” measures actually added bureaucratic layers:
In one example, a State Department employee described a new requirement for a 250-word essay, extra forms, and days of work and approvals needed to hire a vendor for an embassy event, which previously would have taken a single day. In another, a NASA employee was required to write several detailed paragraphs justifying a purchase of fastening bolts. FDA employees have stated that DOGE requirements have caused significant delays in routine food monitoring tests for items like exposure to heavy metals because spending for every step—from purchasing lab supplies to paying to ship samples between labs—now requires separate department-level approval.
Much efficient. Very savings.
As one federal employee stated:
“It is becoming increasingly difficult to continue to work, which I fear is the point.”
Meanwhile, the services Americans actually rely on got measurably worse:
At the Social Security Administration (SSA), wait times for a callback ballooned to as high as two and a half hours for assistance between January and March 2025. Americans attempting to access the SSA website for assistance frequently found the webpage down or unresponsive as DOGE recklessly implemented changes while cutting information technology (IT) staff. SSA eventually discarded several of the supposed fraud checks implemented by DOGE because they significantly delayed claim processing without meaningfully combatting fraud. Career employees reportedly knew that DOGE’s anti-fraud measures would make little difference but were intimidated into silence for fear of losing their jobs. DOGE also implemented a new requirement for Social Security applicants to verify their identity in person instead of over the phone if they aren’t able to do so online, while at the same time closing regional and local offices and reducing the workforce at those offices that remained. More than six million seniors have to drive nearly 50 miles round trip to reach their nearest Social Security office, more than twice the average distance an elderly person expects to drive in a day.
This was a heist dressed up as a reform — and the damage to everyday Americans wasn’t a bug.
Layoffs at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) led to delays in clinical trials and getting new drugs to sick patients. Remaining FDA workers reported struggling to meet statutorily mandated schedules for approving both tobacco products and medical products after the Trump Administration announced 3,500 job cuts across the agency. At one point, FDA drug center leadership resorted to asking drug review staff to volunteer to work on contracting and acquisition tasks because the layoffs had eliminated the entire contracting office.
The Times talked to people on the receiving end of the small-dollar cuts that were DOGE’s actual handiwork. An organization providing counseling and rehabilitation services to torture survivors had to close its centers and stop paying 75% of its staff. A program that sent museum staff into low-income Baltimore schools to teach parents about child development was terminated by form letter because it “no longer serves the interest of the United States.” Research projects were killed at the stage where data had been collected but results hadn’t been published, rendering the government’s entire prior investment wasted. And the impact on American people was real.
Mr. Roehm said he was particularly concerned about possible suicides — around a quarter of the torture victims the group served had recently experienced suicidal ideation.
“We know for sure that survivors we are no longer able to serve are suffering,” he said.
Those dollar amounts were small, compared with DOGE’s largest claims. That is, in effect, how DOGE ultimately saved so little but still caused so much disruption. For small business and local communities, relatively modest sums had major effects.
“It’s the small numbers that hurt people,” said Lisa Shea Mundt, whose company, the Pulse of GovCon, tracks government contracts.
This is how DOGE managed to simultaneously save almost nothing and cause enormous disruption: the big-dollar claims were fake, and the real cuts targeted things that were individually small but collectively devastating to the people who depended on them.
And then there’s the corruption angle, which is where this moves from incompetence into something much uglier.
DOGE staff were embedded at nearly every executive branch agency, and many of them were associates or employees of Musk’s own companies. The conflicts of interest were staggering and barely concealed. The Garcia report details how DOGE staff were involved in firing FDA investigators responsible for oversight of Musk’s biotech company Neuralink. DOGE took aim at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — which just happened to be the agency that would directly oversee a mobile payments function Musk wanted to add to X. The DOGE staffer who oversaw firings at the CFPB owned approximately $365,000 in shares of companies regulated by the Bureau. Executive branch employees are generally prohibited from working on matters in which they hold a personal stake, but there’s no indication this person took any such precautions.
Elon Musk and DOGE’s active involvement in knee-capping agencies with which he has a direct conflict makes clear that Musk, DOGE, and the broader Trump Administration are focused on weakening accountability for the American people while advancing their own interests.
DOGE staff at the IRS initiated mass firing of skilled specialists responsible for auditing the complex tax filings of large corporations and the ultra-wealthy. The Congressional Budget Office has found that reductions in funding for IRS tax enforcement reduce federal revenues. So DOGE’s “efficiency” move at the IRS will likely cost the government more in uncollected taxes than it could ever have saved.
The same pattern held at the CFPB, which since 2011 had received $7.3 billion in funding but returned over $21 billion to consumers through enforcement actions — a three-fold return on investment. DOGE gutted it anyway. The IRS Direct File program — a free electronic tax filing service that 86% of users said increased their trust in the IRS and was projected to save taxpayers $11 billion once fully operational — was killed after lobbying by for-profit tax preparation companies.
And perhaps most alarming were the data security violations that I’ve written about multiple times. A whistleblower from SSA reported that DOGE operatives had accessed a database containing “the entire country’s Social Security information,” copied it to a high-risk external system, and violated a court order barring them from continued access. The DOJ later had to file “corrections” to prior testimony from senior SSA staff, admitting that DOGE employees had in fact accessed SSA’s most sensitive data and covertly signed a “Voter Data Agreement” with a political advocacy group that sought to overturn election results. And here’s one I had missed:
DOGE’s forced access to Treasury data was particularly noteworthy as a Treasury threat intelligence analysis recommended that DOGE staff “be placed under insider threat monitoring and alerting after their access to payment systems is revoked. Continued access to any payment systems by DOGE members, even ‘read only,’ may have posed the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.”
At the NLRB, a whistleblower reported that DOGE operatives sent enormous amounts of sensitive case information outside the government to unknown recipients — information that companies like Musk’s SpaceX could use to “get insights into damaging testimony, union leadership, legal strategies and internal data.” OPM’s own Inspector General found that DOGE employees flouted cybersecurity and privacy laws, and that Trump appointees at OPM overrode career civil servants’ warnings about security to force implementation of DOGE’s systems, which may have resulted in a massive national security threat:
Experts have shown evidence raising concerns of potential Russian and Chinese access to OPM servers shortly after DOGE created the government-wide email infrastructure. Separately, information received by Committee Democratic staff indicated that DOGE employees lowered all firewall protections at OPM to enable the exfiltration of data for use outside of a government environment.
Yikes.
And while they were gutting agencies that protect Americans, they also gutted the agencies actually responsible for catching waste, fraud, and abuse. Offices of Inspectors General — the very watchdogs whose mission aligns with what DOGE claimed to be doing — were starved of resources. One OIG lost 20% of its staff and was operating with “the fewest number of auditors in decades.” The DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, which oversees prosecutions of politicians accused of corruption, was purged of all but a fraction of its former employees.
The Garcia report’s conclusion is perhaps the most honest assessment of the whole debacle:
Many analyses have referred to the DOGE disaster as a failure, and DOGE did indeed fail at its stated mission of meaningfully reducing spending and increasing government efficiency. But in the Trump Administration’s vindictive, ideologically motivated, and pointless quest to break the federal government, drive out talented and committed public servants, and make flashy promises of cutting fraud while enriching themselves and their wealthy donors, DOGE was a resounding success.
Now, the Garcia report is a Democratic minority report, and the most committed DOGE defenders will dismiss it on those grounds alone. But the most devastating evidence comes from DOGE’s own website — which kept quietly deleting incorrect entries — from the Times’ independent analysis, from a defense contractor’s CEO telling his shareholders the “savings” were meaningless, from the GAO finding multiple violations of the Impoundment Control Act, from OPM’s own Inspector General, and from the DOJ having to file corrections to its own court filings.
You don’t need to trust a single Democratic politician to see what happened here. You just need to look at the numbers.
Oh, and yes: Musk himself admitted in a podcast interview with MAGA influencer and former DOGE employee Katie Miller (wife of Stephen) in December that DOGE had fallen short and said that if he could go back in time, he wouldn’t do it again, preferring instead to have “worked on my companies.” The man who was going to supposedly save the republic from government bloat decided his actual companies were more worth his time. Musk’s public admission probably shouldn’t carry too much weight either way — he knows DOGE was publicly perceived as a failure and he’s distancing himself — but it is a fitting coda.
This whole thing was billed not just by MAGA faithful, but also by many in the media, as an expected triumph of private sector brilliance over government incompetence. What it actually demonstrated is that when you hand the keys to people who don’t understand how government works, don’t respect the people who do, and have massive personal financial conflicts of interest, you get chaos, corruption, and a bigger bill for taxpayers. The people who were making government work better — the original U.S. Digital Service employees who were building more efficient systems and better websites — got fired and replaced with Musk acolytes who couldn’t tell the difference between a contract ceiling and actual spending.
The MAGA world continues to pretend DOGE was a ruthless cost-cutting machine. The receipts say otherwise: it failed in every direction except enriching corporations connected to the administration. It was a looting operation dressed up as reform.
Brendan Carr is once again doing Brendan Carr stuff.
Carr has threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of broadcasters that tell the truth about Trump’s disastrous war in Iran. In a post over at Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website, Carr insists that news outlets that are “running hoaxes and news distortions” (read: telling the truth) about the war will face potential headaches when their licenses come up for renewal:
If you can’t read that, it says:
Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions – also known as the fake news – have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.
The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.
And frankly, changing course is in their own business interests since trust in legacy media has now fallen to an all time low of just 9% and are ratings disasters.
The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s airwaves.
It is very important to bring trust back into media, which has earned itself the label of fake news.
When a political candidate is able to win a landslide election victory after in the face of hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong. It means the public has lost faith and confidence in the media. And we can’t allow that to happen.
Time for change!
That’s certainly a lot of tough-talking bullshit.
Carr’s only authority comes over broadcast affiliates (not national media companies or cable TV outlets), most of which are already owned by Republicans and already kiss Trump’s ass (because they want to merge). The FCC hasn’t denied a license renewal in decades, and any attempt to do so would result in a massive, protracted First Amendment legal mess that the FCC would be extremely likely to lose.
Carr’s actual goal for this kind of stuff is three fold.
One, he’s putting on a show for our mad, idiot king that Carr is being a good boy. Two, he’s trolling the press so they’ll hyperventilate about his behaviors; those stories then advertise to the MAGA base the false impression that Carr is doing useful and bold culture war stuff (so he can potentially run for higher office). They’ll assume it all must be useful and important because he’s upsetting people of intellect, importance, and conscience, which they enjoy.
But most importantly it sends a message to media companies that they should get in line with the Trump administration or face costly and expensive (no matter how pointless) legal annoyances. Of course those threats haven’t really been needed, because most U.S. media companies (and big corporations) have been happy to bribe the president or kiss his ass anyway.
That sort of feckless journalistic failure in the face of power is why so much of the public has lost faith in U.S. news, not because they’ve historically been too critical of war or too tough on wealth and power.
While these sorts of threats certainly are dangerous, Carr is a monumental clown who is putting on a big show to try and pretend he’s a person of substance and power doing important things.
Meanwhile Trump is upset that some news outlets have been making it clear he was too stupid to understand the evolving nature of low cost, modern drone warfare (despite all the evidence in Ukraine). In his own post at his own right wing propaganda website, Trump went off on a local rambling tirade about Iran somehow misleading the entirety of U.S. media:
That one says:
Iran has long been known as a Master of Media Manipulation and Public Relations. They are Militarily ineffective and weak, but are really good at “feeding” the very appreciative Fake News Media false information. Now, A.I. has become another Disinformation weapon that Iran uses, quite well, considering they are being annihilated by the day. They showed phony “Kamikaze Boats,” shooting at various Ships at Sea, which looks wonderful, powerful, and vicious, but these Boats don’t exist — It’s all false information to show how “tough” their already defeated Military is! The five U.S. Refueling Planes that were supposedly struck down and badly damaged, according to The Wall Street Journal’s false reporting, and others, are all in service, with the exception of one, which will soon be flying the skies. Buildings and Ships that are shown to be on fire are not — It’s FAKE NEWS, generated by A.I. For instance, Iran, working in close coordination with the Fake News Media, shows our great USS Abraham Lincoln Aircraft Carrier, one of the largest and most prestigious Ships in the World, burning uncontrollably in the Ocean. Not only was it not burning, it was not even shot at — Iran knows better than to do that! The story was knowingly FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information! The fact is, Iran is being decimated, and the only battles they “win” are those that they create through AI, and are distributed by Corrupt Media Outlets. The Radical Leftwing Press knows this full well, but continues to go forward with false stories and LIES. That’s why their Approval Rating is so low, and I can win a Presidential Election, IN A LANDSLIDE, getting only 5% positive Press — They have no credibility! I am so thrilled to see Brendan Carr, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), looking at the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic “News” Organizations. They get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES, both in News and almost all of their Shows, including the Late Night Morons, who get gigantic Salaries for horrible Ratings, and never get, as I used to say in The Apprentice, “FIRED.” Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
These are not the behaviors of competent, confidence people who believe things are going well. They’re the sad gyrations of pathetic men who know Trump is on historic trajectory to be the worst and least popular President in U.S. history (with ample room to fall). No amount of posturing can hide it.
Normally, a post about the signing of an NFL free agent wouldn’t make it anywhere near these here Techdirt pages. Today, that is not the case. The site For The Win posted a mildly interesting report on the Tennessee Titans signing wide receiver Wan’Dale Robinson to a 4 year, $78 million contract.
But wait, you’re wondering, where does the Techdirt part of this come in? Well, it starts with this passage from the FTW post:
Fortunately there’s wiggle room should things fail to pan out. With only $38 million guaranteed, the Titans can reasonably walk away from this deal after one or two years and start fresh.
This contract isn’t as big as it seems and could be an asset if Robinson’s 2025 was merely his first giant leap forward in a career marked by growth. As it stands, he seems like the name brand version of the Temu receivers Ward played with as a rookie. That’s a good thing, even if it’s an expensive one.
And then it morphs into this, direct from the FTW author of that post:
ooooh temu figured out it's now shorthand for "cheap off-brand garbage" and is not happy about it
Let me stipulate a couple of items. There seems to be nothing in Temu’s reach-out that resembles a threat. They aren’t making any demands. All of the communication seems to be polite enough and I’ve seen companies behave far worse than this when their brands are associated with something negative.
That said, this is still the weakest of sauces. Reaching out to a sports reporter as a large retailer brand just because you don’t like a single throwaway joke-line in a story about a free agent signing is a demonstration of the thinnest of skins under any circumstances. It’s all the more so when the brand in question does have very real reputation problems with large swaths of the public, earned or otherwise.
It doesn’t take much in the way of Google-Fu to uncover precisely why the author of the post chose to associate Temu with knockoff quality products. The company is not BBB accredited. It has a 2 out of 5 star review on Trustpilot. There are a ton of Reddit threads just like this one with people sharing their negative experiences buying off of Temu.
I’ve never bought from Temu. But there is a great deal of smoke out there for there to not be any fire. And if Temu really thinks the best path towards correcting its reputational problems is firing off requests to remove references to those problems from articles about professional athletes, well, then I’m beginning to see the real source of the problem here.
It has long been clear: Trump needs to be removed from office before he can inflict even more damage than he already has. But he doesn’t just need to be stopped; for America to have a future he also needs to be repudiated. Impeachment speaks to each need, to both make clear his behavior is beyond anything we would ever tolerate as well as remove his capacity to continue it.
But by not even attempting to impeach him, or any of his malign administration officials, he not only remains able to wreak more destruction but he now does it with Congress’s blessing. Instead of being repudiated, his behavior is endorsed. Because one could fairly conclude that if anyone in Congress had an issue with what Trump is doing, then surely they would try to do something to stop it with the power they have. Yet, with the so far sole exception of Representative Green, who has actually tried, twice, to file impeachment articles against Trump, no one—from any party—has filed any against anyone.
Obviously many in Congress do in fact object to what Trump does—there are tweets and speeches saying as much. But it’s all sound and fury signifying nothing. Tweets and speeches do not amount to any sort of useful action. And through inaction the only message we’re sending is that no one thinks it is worth doing anything more.
A stunned and increasingly wounded world is now coming to terms with the realization that Trump’s disqualifying misbehavior is the sort of thing can happen in America, and moreover, the sort of thing that will be allowed to happen in America. His abuse of power—as well as his warmongering, war criming, corruption, ignorance, incompetence, racism, and range of other unconstitutional, illegal, and even criminal activities—is apparently something not just possible under our constitutional order but enabled. As we watch an addled monster drive us all towards disaster, with the rest of the U.S. government willingly along for the ride and no one with the constitutional authority even trying to apply the brakes, one is left to conclude that, at best, our vaunted Constitution must not provide an effective immune system to address Trump’s antidemocratic malfeasance, or, worse, that Americans are fine with all of it, because, even if there were a mechanism to stop him, there’s apparently no one with the authority to trigger it who thinks it’s worth bothering with. Both conclusions paint a very different picture of what sort of country the United States is than most had previously imagined, and it is this re-envisioning of America that will affect how others let the country and its people live in the wider world even after Trump is finally gone.
Of course, there is actually an immune system. The fundamental power to remove Trump from office—impeachment—is still there, as provided by the Constitution; the issue is that no one is willing to use it. And that unwillingness is ultimately what the world is judging, because when they wonder why no one is using it, it’s impossible to avoid concluding that no one else in the government of the United States of America, despite everything Trump is doing, thinks there’s actually a problem to address.
Perhaps this conclusion is unfair, though, so let’s take a moment to consider whether there could be any sort justification for Congress’s inaction. And, more specifically, the Democratic members of Congress, because while it’s an indefensible abdication of their own oath of office for Republican members of Congress to refuse to police Trump, because in theory he’s their guy, it’s something else for the political opposition to also refuse to, especially when he’s supposedly not their guy at all.
Perhaps that opposition may begin to explain the reluctance to take action: for better or worse, Trump was duly elected President and in general it is a good thing if democratic expressions of political will are respected, even, and especially, by those who disagree with them. As Trump himself illustrates, de-legitimizing election results is not healthy for a sustainable democracy. There may also be the pragmatic concern that taking aim at someone the people chose is bad politics, because it will antagonize the electorate so that they never vote for you, although recent polls and election results strongly suggest that this fear is unfounded. Furthermore, Trump never should have been on the ballot in the first place. As an ineligible insurrectionist he never was someone that Americans should have been able to choose to be President, and that he was nevertheless voted into office already means his reign is inherently illegitimate, and in a way that undermines our democracy more than if its legitimacy were challenged. But even setting his eligibility doubts aside, it’s one thing to acknowledge Trump as the legitimately-elected President. But it’s another entirely to allow him, as President, more power than the office actually grants him and shrug off the unconstitutional ways he abuses it. The Constitution only grants him so much, and no one has the right to grant him more by failing to check him when he has nevertheless taken it.
Perhaps some of the reluctance to press for impeachment is out of the concern that, terrible president or no, Congress still has a job to do to run the country, and bad things can happen if it turns its attention away. But this sort of mis-prioritization can’t withstand scrutiny either. For one thing, bad things are already happening by not acting to stop Trump. And not just all the bad things he’s doing, but all the bad things that Congress is doing too, like not passing ACA subsidies, or spending its time instead doing antidemocratic things like trying to pass First Amendment-violating legislation to censor the Internet, as if this moment of looming autocracy were a good time to join in on the constitutional violations too.
Perhaps the reticence to pursue impeachment is motivated by the desire to remain cordial with colleagues across the aisle, in the hopes that it could lead to mutually-negotiated solutions. If so, however, it doesn’t seem like such politesse is paying off particularly well—after all, those ACA subsidies still haven’t been passed, and Trump remains in office, doing things that hurt Americans, including the constituents of both Democrats and Republicans, along with the rest of the world and our standing in it. While it is true that there have been some small successes managing to restrain Trump here and there using more traditional political pressure, at best such efforts are like trying to drain the ocean with a teaspoon, one issue at a time, while meanwhile a deluge of chaos drowns us all. Congress has still left us all defenseless to danger that by not even trying to do what it would take to stop it.
And even if the concern about bringing impeachment now is that it wouldn’t have the votes to pass, it would still be bad math. First, by not pressing impeachment it prevents the political calculus from evolving so that there could come to be enough votes—no one needs to join the push for it if there’s no push happening. And it makes it doubtful that there would ever be enough votes, not even after midterms—assuming, of course, that an unchecked Trump doesn’t do something to interfere with them happening. If Congress is waiting for voters to send them more colleagues who will join them in impeaching, voters will need to know that there is an impeachment effort to be joined. Yet so far there is none. Not impeaching sends the signal that impeachment isn’t warranted, and if it isn’t warranted by now, there’s little reason for anyone to think that those already not bothering to try are ever going to change their mind and start.
Ultimately, no matter what members of Congress tell themselves to try to justify why they have acquiesced to Trump instead of playing the best card the Constitution gave them to stop him, all of those excuses ultimately fall flat. Trump is destroying America, but by refusing to use the tools the Constitution gave them to stop him, it is Congress that is finishing it off for good. Not just by letting him wreck everything we’ve built for 250 years, and the lives and liberties—as well as global and economic stability—that depended on the Constitution’s promise being fulfilled. But by doing nothing it instead sends the very loud message, now reverberating around the globe, that everything he and his subordinates are doing is fine, when the reality is anything but.
And the world is noticing. When they look at America they see it not as a strong, stalwart ally, but a frail country with weak civic institutions vulnerable to capture, indifferent to such a fate as long as it doesn’t affect the price of eggs, and possibly not even then. Worse, as Congress refuses to defend America from the exigent danger Trump represents to it and the world, and through its inaction instead enable it, the world is left to conclude that Trump is what America wants, because no one governing it is saying otherwise.
Without a sign that America does not want Trump, other countries are forced to presume it does and act accordingly, even when doing so is bad for themselves and the future—and even us. Not only does it mean they can’t support us in our effort to rid ourselves of him, because there is no effort to support, but in the absence of any official pushback they have little choice but to accept him as legitimate, even though doing so only reinforces the power he is abusing and makes reclaiming America from his lawless grasp that much harder to eventually effect.
Yet there seems to be this naïve belief held by many of the same cowered members of Congress currently doing nothing that somehow the problem will magically resolve, and once Trump is somehow eventually out of office America will simply be welcomed back to the world stage as a respected member of the global order. As if all we need to do is wait for his chaotic storm to pass and then we can all pick up where we left off. And as if the world will simply forgive and forget the real and often irreparable harm Trump has been inflicting, far beyond America’s borders, and that America has been refusing to even try to lift a finger to stop.
The world will not. Failing to impeach, among all its other infirmities, is a long-term foreign policy problem. Without impeachment, to not just dislodge Trump from office so he can no longer hurt us anymore but unequivocally condemn the harm he has already inflicted, and not just on ourselves, we will be resented, and rightly so. Not for what Trump has himself done, but for what we have been glad to let him do to us all.
We’ve been covering the growing parade of lawyers submitting AI-hallucinated case citations to courts for a while now. It keeps happening, and courts keep having to deal with it. But the pattern is usually the same: a careless attorney uses ChatGPT to draft a brief, the fake citations get spotted by the opposing side or the judge, and sanctions follow. Embarrassing, but contained.
What happened in a California state appellate case decided this month is something far more insane (found via Bluesky). A hallucinated citation traveled through an entire legal proceeding — from a Reddit blog post to a client’s declaration to an attorney’s letter to the opposing attorney’s draft of the court order to the judge’s signature to appellate filings — and at no point along the way did anyone bother to check whether the case actually existed.
Oh, and the whole thing was about custody of a dog named Kyra.
We publish this opinion to emphasize that courts and attorneys alike have a responsibility to protect the legal system against distortion by fabricated law, particularly in this new era of hallucinated citations generated by artificial intelligence (AI) tools. In a system of precedents that is designed to achieve consistency, predictability, and adherence to the rule of law, the judiciary cannot function properly unless judges and lawyers confirm the authenticity of cited authorities and review them to evaluate their holdings and reasoning. When the participants fail to perform this basic function, it compromises these institutional values and diminishes faith in the judicial process.
Here’s how the case got there: Joan Pablo Torres Campos (Torres) and Leslie Ann Munoz dissolved their domestic partnership in 2022. Two years later, Torres wanted shared custody and visitation of Kyra (the dog). Munoz, represented pro bono by her cousin — attorney Roxanne Chung Bonar — opposed. In her opposition, Bonar cited two cases: Marriage of Twigg and Marriage of Teegarden.
Neither case exists. Or rather, the actual citations Bonar gave correspond to completely unrelated cases — one is a criminal case, and the other is a spousal support case from a different year with a different citation. But as cited by Bonar, with the holdings she described, these cases were pure fiction.
And where did the fake citations come from? Apparently a Reddit blog post. By someone named… Sassafras Patterdale. I am not joking:
Bonar did not submit any declaration of her own, but she submitted one from her client Munoz. Munoz explained that the Twigg case was discussed in a Reddit article a paralegal friend had sent her, and Munoz did not realize the case was fictitious. The Reddit article was attached as an exhibit to Munoz’s declaration. It was authored by “Sassafras Patterdale,” who was identified as “a blogger, podcaster, and animal rescuer, who writes about divorce, custody, and the messy, beautiful lives we weave.” The article was about pet custody battles. It cited “Marriage of Twigg (1984) 34 Cal.3d 926” as a “watershed” California Supreme Court case holding “that custody determinations must consider the emotional well, being [sic] and stability of the parties.”
The Reddit article did not include the parallel reporter citations and date of decision for Twigg that were included in Bonar’s opposition to the second motion to reinstate the appeal. Neither Bonar’s response to our order nor Munoz’s declaration explained where this additional fictitious information came from.
And then Torres’s own lawyer — a reminder: he’s the one who filed the lawsuit to get visitation with the dog — drafted the proposed court order and included the same fake citations the opposing party had used, without verifying them either.
And the court signed it. Because of course it did.
Torres’s counsel submitted a proposed Findings and Order After Hearing, which the court approved as conforming to its oral ruling. The order cited the fictional Twigg and Teegarden cases as follows:
“The Court notes the follow[ing] cases: Marriage of Twigg (1984) 34 Cal.3d 926 and Marriage of Teegarden (1995) 33 Cal.App.4th 1572 [(Teegarden)], in which the Court has to take the well-being and stability of the parties involved when deciding pet visitation and custody….”
So to recap: the fake citation originated on Reddit, traveled into the defendant client’s declaration, was used by the defendant client’s attorney, was then included by the opposing attorney in the draft order, and was signed by the judge. Nobody — not either attorney, not the judge — looked up the cases.
But that’s just the warm-up.
Torres appealed. His appeal was dismissed for failure to file an opening brief. He moved to reinstate it. In her opposition to that motion, Bonar — still representing Munoz — cited the fake cases again, this time telling the appellate court: “This isn’t new, courts decide these based on what’s best for everyone involved (Marriage of Twigg (1984) 34 Cal.3d 926; In re Marriage of Teegarden (1995) 33 Cal.App.4th 1572).”
Torres filed a second motion to reinstate, and this time finally pointed out that these were “invented case law.”
Now, a reasonable response to being told your citations are fabricated might be to quietly check, discover the problem, and apologize to the court — ideally with some groveling, in hopes of limited sanctions.
Bonar, however, chose a different path. She doubled down. Hard.
Bonar filed another opposition on behalf of Munoz. The opposition stated: “Appellant’s Claim of Fabricated Case Law is Baseless.” It asserted: “This is a grave accusation, but it is entirely unfounded and reflects Appellant’s own failure to conduct basic legal research. Both cases are valid, published precedents, and Appellant’s inability to locate them underscores the incompetence that led to his appeal’s dismissal.”
And then she went further, providing additional citation details for the fake Twigg case — parallel reporter citations, a specific date of decision — none of which appeared in the original Reddit article and all of which were also completely fabricated:
“Marriage of Twigg (1984) 34 Cal.3d 926: This is a legitimate California Supreme Court case, reported at 34 Cal.3d 926, 195 Cal.Rptr. 718, 670 P.2d 340, decided on July 5, 1984. The ruling addresses custody determinations in dissolution proceedings, emphasizing the importance of the emotional well-being and stability of the parties involved.”
None of those parallel citations correspond to a Twigg case. No California case by that name was decided on July 5, 1984. The additional details were just as fake as the original citation — almost certainly generated by an AI tool when Bonar went looking for backup. During oral arguments (i.e., well after the judge had already issued an order to show cause about the fictional citations) she finally admitted maybe she had used AI:
At oral argument, Bonar claimed she could not remember where this additional fictitious citation information came from. She acknowledged she did not have a paid subscription to a legal research service at the time, and she was using other online resources including AI for this purpose. She also conceded she may have obtained fictitious information about Twigg and Teegarden using AI tools.
But the cherry on top — the part where you have to put the ruling down and go for a walk just to remind yourself that some other part of the world is good — is that in this same filing where she doubled down on fabricated case law with additional fabricated details, Bonar accused opposing counsel of being the incompetent one and mocks them for being unable to search and find the non-existent cases.
Appellant’s assertion that no such case or parties exist is incorrect; a simple search for ‘Teegarden marriage California’ reveals the 1986 decision involving Anne and Byron Teegarden. This misrepresentation not only fails to prove misconduct but exposes Appellant’s counsel’s deficient preparation, which mirrors the neglect that caused the default.
Again: she called the lawyer who (eventually) correctly identified her fake citations incompetent for failing to find cases that don’t exist.
The court was not amused. It hit Bonar with $5,000 in sanctions — significantly more than the $1,500 that the same court imposed in a recent similar case — specifically because she “persisted in and aggravated the misconduct by providing additional fictitious citation information” and “still has not been completely forthcoming with this court.” The opinion is also being forwarded to the State Bar of California.
As for Torres, the appellant who did finally correctly identify the fake citations? He lost anyway. The court found that because his own lawyer drafted and submitted the order containing the fake citations without objecting or verifying them, he forfeited his right to challenge those citations on appeal. In other words: his lawyer helped propagate the hallucinated citations by including them in the draft order, and he can’t now complain about the very thing his lawyer failed to catch.
Torres forfeited his claim of error both by his affirmative conduct and his inaction. Although Munoz and Bonar were responsible for improperly citing these fictitious authorities in the first place, Torres’s own counsel affirmatively drafted and submitted the proposed order with these citations that was ultimately signed by the family court. And even though his own counsel drafted the order, Torres failed to object to the court’s reliance on these citations or call the court’s attention to the issue.
There’s a lesson here that goes well beyond “lawyers should verify their citations” — though they really, desperately should. This case shows how hallucinated AI output achieves a kind of credibility laundering as it passes through the system. The fake citation looked more legitimate in the client’s declaration because it had been in a blog post. More legitimate in the court order because it had been in the declaration. More legitimate in the appellate filing because it had been in the court order. At each step, someone assumed that someone earlier in the chain had already done the checking. Nobody had.
In a legal system built entirely on the idea that citations to precedent mean something — that every case cited in an order actually happened and actually stands for the proposition claimed — this kind of cascading failure is really, really bad. And as AI tools get better at generating plausible-sounding legal citations — complete with reporter volumes, page numbers, and dates — the obligation on every participant in the system to actually verify what they’re citing becomes that much more important.
The court itself apparently recognized that its “please just check your citations” message might need some institutional reinforcement. Its footnote at the end of the sanctions section quietly recommends that the Judicial Council consider adopting formal guidelines or rules requiring verification of citations — particularly in party-drafted orders submitted for a judge’s signature. Which is, in hindsight, an obvious hole in the system. But it took Sassafras Patterdale, a Reddit post, and a dog named Kyra to expose it.
We’ve discussed at length how Trump’s “fix” for TikTok’s problems basically involved forcing the sale of the platform to his greedy billionaire buddies (with the help of pathetic Democrats). The deal fixed none of the real issues Trumpland pretended to be concerned about (national security, privacy, propaganda), and China still maintains a significant ownership stake.
As the Wall Street Journal notes (paywalled), the “Trump administration” is set to receive a $10 billion fee from investors for facilitating the deal. The new owners, which include Trump’s friend Larry Ellison, private equity giant Silver Lake, and MGX (controlled by the UAE) are funneling the payments, which will total $10 billion, to the “Treasury Department”:
“They and other backers paid the Treasury Department about $2.5 billion when the deal closed in January and are set to make several additional payments until hitting the $10 billion total, the people said.”
We, of course, don’t actually know where that money is going and will actually be used for. You can confidently assume it will somehow eventually wind its way into Trump’s pocket somehow, since the entirety of U.S. democratic oversight has been wholly corrupted by these whiny zealots, who are busy stripping the country for parts and selling it for scrap off the back loading dock.
Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal goes to comical lengths to normalize this bribe, though they do at least try to express how “unprecedented” this sort of thing is by citing an unnamed, ambiguous historian:
“The $10 billion payment would be nearly unprecedented for a government helping arrange a transaction, historians have said. Vice President JD Vance previously said the new TikTok entity running the U.S. operations is valued at about $14 billion in the deal, which some tech analysts have said dramatically undervalues the company.”
The outlet goes on to note that the $10 billion fee absolutely towers over any remotely comparable historical precedent:
“Investment bankers advising on a typical deal receive fees of less than 1% of the transaction value, and the percentage generally gets smaller as the deal size increases. Bank of America is in line to make some $130 million for advising railroad operator Norfolk Southern on its $71.5 billion sale to Union Pacific, one of the largest fees on record for a single bank on a deal.
Administration officials have said the fee is justified given Trump’s role in saving TikTok in the U.S. and navigating negotiations with China to get the deal done while addressing the security concerns of lawmakers. “
The Wall Street Journal can’t be bothered to note that the deal fixed absolutely none of the purported concerns raised about TikTok. China still has a major ownership stake, and the new owners seem every bit as hostile to democracy and free expression as the worst Chinese autocrat (they’re just not honest enough with themselves or you to admit it yet).
All of these owners are equally just as likely to engage in privacy and surveillance violations as the Chinese (which again, despite a lot of pretense, did not have full direct control over the app). In fact, you could even argue that the previous TikTok was likely to be better on all of these subjects because they were at least trying to adhere to ethical standards to remain operating in the country.
TikTok’s new American owners are very up front about their plans to demolish the entirety of regulatory autonomy, corporate oversight, and consumer protection, leaving them with absolute freedom to pursue whatever unethical bullshit they can dream up. I suspect they’ll try to leave things alone for a year (to avoid a mass exodus of young people) before their goals become… unsubtle.
Again, Trump, with Democratic help, managed to steal the world’s most popular short form video app and offload it to his radical billionaire friends under the pretense he was protecting national security and U.S. consumer privacy. Even before you get to this $10 billion bribe, it’s easily one of the ugliest examples of corruption and U.S. tech policy dysfunction we’ve ever seen.
I like to convince myself history will not be kind.
It’s not that arrest and ticket quotas don’t exist. They do. They always have. They always will. It’s that they’re illegal. Courts have repeatedly criticized quotas because they create incentives so perverse they’d make /b/ board denizens uncomfortable.
Since they’re presumptively illegal, most law enforcement agencies will use any word but “quota” to describe these. They’ll toss around words like “performance goals” or “metrics” or just simply refuse to discuss them at all until they’re forced to.
The Trump administration — in this case personified by advisor Stephen Miller — also doesn’t use the word “quota.” Miller has stated he wants to see 3,000 migrant arrests daily. He’s also made it clear that this is the minimum expected of the government’s anti-migrant storm troopers.
Trump expects the same thing. “Surges” exclusively targeting cities and states Trump lost in the last two elections have generated enough backlash that Trump has had second thoughts about leaning heavily on the first word in the phrase “brutal efficiency.” Those were swiftly replaced by Trump’s third thoughts because that’s just how his goldfish brain operates.
A few sidelinings aside, it’s business as usual in the Trump administration’s war on non-white people. Litigation was always the inevitable outcome of programs that relied on routine rights violations to accomplish the lofty goals set by Stephen Miller.
In Oregon, plenty of federal occupation activity has already occurred. Portland’s residents appear to have won, but there’s still the matter of ongoing lawsuits seeking compensation for violated rights and/or seeking injunctions forbidding any future rights violations.
While it’s true that federal officers like to lie about stuff they’ve done or will do, these lies are almost always exposed once they submit evidence or testify under oath. In an ongoing class action lawsuit being spearheaded by Innovation Law Lab, ICE officers are delivering testimony that not only exposes some aspects of its always-on surveillance efforts, but the lies told by the DHS about the supposed nonexistence of arrest quotas.
Details about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers’ surveillance tools and arrest goals in the state have come to light in a federal lawsuit that compelled officers to answer questions under oath, offering a rare window into opaque, internal strategies that are generally kept secret and have been driving mass detentions and chaotic raids.
[…]
Testimony in a December hearing in the case provided a remarkable acknowledgment by an ICE officer of how daily target arrest numbers played out at the local level, and appeared to contradict the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials’ repeated claims that officers didn’t have quotas. Trump adviser Stephen Miller has publicly said the administration’s target was 3,000 daily arrests. The hearing also appeared to be the first time that ICE disclosed in court its use of an app called Elite for operations.
The testimony was delivered last year, but the transcript [PDF] was only recently published by the court. What hasn’t been revealed is the testifying officer’s name. He’s only known as “JB,” but he did say several concerning things during his testimony, including stating that his team was given a “verbal order to target eight arrests per day.” The government’s lawyer objected to the term “quota” (when it was used by the plaintiff’s lawyer), but the judge overrode the objection.
In addition, JB stated that his team relied on an app called Elite to find supposed illegal immigrants.
JB explained that Elite was a “newer app” given to ICE agents. The app, he said, is “kind of like Google Maps” and shows how many individuals with an “immigration nexus” are believed to be in a certain area. Another officer testified that a “nexus” could mean any history of contact with immigration officials, which could include a naturalized US citizen.
[…]
JB acknowledged information generated by Elite could be inaccurate: “The app could say 100%, and it’s wrong. The person doesn’t live there. And so it’s not accurate. It’s a tool that we use that gives you probability, but there’s … no such thing as 100%.”
There’s a lot that’s unknown about this app. Even those relying on it don’t even know what sources it uses to make these determinations, although officers appear to realize it’s far from perfect. Not that it stops them from using it as an excuse to raid neighborhoods or engage in unlawful stops.
This case centers around an unlawful stop and detention, one aided and abetted not by fallible tech, but by the officers shrugging off indeterminate search results and lying about what happened in the arrest paperwork.
MJMA had entered the US with a valid temporary visa last year. Still, JB’s team wrote in their arrest records – inaccurately – that the farm worker entered the US unlawfully. The report also inaccurately described the stop of the van as “consensual”, the judge noted.
All of this has led to an injunction against federal immigration agencies, with the court saying this in the order [PDF] it handed down two weeks ago:
There is no telling how many people would have sought counsel, or would have benefited from it. It is clear that there are countless more people who have been rounded up, and who either remain in detention or have “voluntarily” deported than those, like M-J-M-A-, who were fortunate enough to find counsel at the eleventh hour. Defendants benefit from this blitz approach to immigration enforcement that takes advantage of navigating outside of the boundaries of conducting lawful arrests. For the one detainee who has the audacity to challenge the legality of her detention and gains release, several more remain detained or succumb to the threat of lengthy detention, and then instead “voluntarily” deport. Defendants win the numbers game at the cost of debasing the rule of law.
All of that adds up, now that we can read the transcript. “Debasing the law?” It’s all there, from the quotas to reliance on sketchy mass surveillance apps to the falsification of the narrative by officers hoping to lie their way into constitutionality. This is the administration, personified by a pseudonymous federal agents who are expected to make Trump’s warped dreams a reality. In the middle of all of this are thousands of people and a half-dozen civil liberties, all of which can only hope to survive the next couple of years.
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Much of last week I had been working on a different article than the one this became. The American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, and the American Council of Learned Societies — all plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the National Endowment for the Humanities over DOGE’s mass grant cancellations — had uploaded the full video depositions of four government witnesses to YouTube. I had been watching through the many hours of those videos, planning to write specifically about what former DOGE operatives Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh actually said under oath about how they decided which grants to kill.
I had already written about what the legal filings revealed back in February, well before the NY Times published its own deep dive into the depositions last week. But the videos added something the transcripts couldn’t fully capture: the demeanor of two young guys with zero government experience who were handed the power to destroy hundreds of millions of dollars in already-approved humanities grants, and who were now forced to sit there, on camera, and attempt (weakly) to explain themselves. Before I could publish my piece, 404 Media’s Joseph Cox covered some of what was found in the depositions and illustrated it with these thumbnails of Fox straight from YouTube that certainly… tell a story.
And then, of course, the government got the videos taken down. Because these alpha disruptors who thought they were saving America by nuking grants for Holocaust documentaries and Black civil rights research turned out to be too fragile to withstand a little internet mockery for their dipshittery.
We’ll get to that part. But first, let’s talk about what made the depositions so devastating, and why the government was so desperate to hide them.
As we covered in February, the actual “process” by which Fox and Cavanaugh decided to terminate nearly every active NEH grant from the Biden administration was, to put it charitably, not a process at all. Fox fed short grant descriptions into ChatGPT with a prompt that read:
“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.”
That was it. A chatbot verdict in fewer characters than a tweet. As Cox reported after watching all six-plus hours of Fox’s deposition, nobody told Fox to use an LLM for this. He did it on his own. He called it an “intermediary step” — a fancy way of saying he asked the magic answer box to justify what he’d already decided to do.
The depositions revealed the ChatGPT prompt raising flags that would be comedic if the grants hadn’t actually been terminated. As the NY Times reported:
A documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust? The focus on gender risked “contributing to D.E.I. by amplifying marginalized voices.”
Even an effort to catalog and digitize the papers of Thomas Gage, a British general in the American Revolution, was guilty of “promoting inclusivity and diversity in historical research.”
The Thomas Gage one is really something. The British general who oversaw the colonial crackdown that helped trigger the American Revolution is apparently too “diverse” for Trump’s “America First” humanities agenda. George Washington’s papers got spared, but the papers of the guy Washington fought against? DEI.
A sizable portion of the deposition was spent trying to get Fox to define DEI. He couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. He repeatedly deferred to the text of Trump’s executive order on DEI, while also admitting he couldn’t recall what it actually said.
How do you interpret DEI?
Fox: [sighs and then a very long pause] There was the EO explicitly laid out the details. I don’t remember it off the top of my head.
It’s okay. I’m asking for your understanding of it.
Fox: Yeah, my understanding was exactly what was written in the EO.
Okay, so can you…
Fox: I don’t remember what was in the EO.
So right now do you have an understanding of what DEI is?
Fox: Yeah.
Okay, so what’s your understanding as you sit here today in this deposition?
Fox: Um, well, it it was exactly what was written in the EO. And so anytime that we would look at a grant through the lens of complying with an executive order, we would just refer back to the EO and assess if this grant had relation to it.
Okay. But I guess I’m stepping back from your uh methodology strictly in terminating the grants. Do you have an understanding as you sit here today of what DEI means?
Fox: Yeah.
Okay. So what’s your understanding of what it means?
Fox: Well, I [scoffs] it is it is is exactly what was written in the EO. And I don’t have the EO in front of me, but that was we would always reference back to the EO and make sure that this grant was in compliance with the EO.
I understand that. Okay, but I’m not asking necessarily about what was in the EO. I’m asking very specifically about your present understanding of what… of DEI? Do you have a present understanding of DEI?
Fox: Yeah!
Okay. Can you explain what that present understanding is?
Fox: Um well, it It’s just easier for me to be referencing back to the EO.
Are you refusing to answer the question?
Fox: I’m not refusing to answer the question. I just feel that referencing back to the verbatim executive order was the best way for us to capture all of the DEI language. And so, I think giving a a high-level overview of what I could relay as DEI is not going to do justice what was written in the EO.
And that’s okay. We can look at the EO as well.
Fox: Great.
I’m asking you for I mean this is a deposition. I’m asking you questions. You’re under oath to answer them. So what what is your understanding of what DEI means?
Fox: Well, I I think I would say again that I I would go back to the EO to make sure I’m capturing enough. I don’t I don’t feel comfortable saying a high level overview because it is such a big bucket and there’s just a lot of pieces of the puzzle.
What’s a part of the bucket?
Fox: Um gender fluidity um sort of promoting um like promoting subsets of LGBTQ+ that um might um alienate another part of the community. Um. Again, it was just easier for us to reference back into the EO.
Okay, so …
Fox: And I don’t want to give you a broad overview because it’s at the end of the day it it is capturing… it is all encompassing in the EO. It’s how we it’s how we did our methodology.
Right. Do you always refer to EOs to gain an understanding of words used in your typical daily vernacular?
Fox: What do you mean?
You you say that you have an understanding what DEI means and when I ask you you say you need to reference the EO. Do you need to reference EOs to define every word you use in your everyday life?
Fox: No.
Okay. So, what’s stopping you from defining DEI to your understanding as you sit here today? On January 28th, 2026.
Fox: It wouldn’t be capturing enough of how big the topic is. DEI is a very broad structure. I’m giving giving my limited recall of what’s included is just not…
But his understanding leaked through anyway when specific grants came up.
Take the grant for a documentary about the 1873 Colfax massacre, where dozens of Black men were murdered by former Confederates and Klan members. ChatGPT flagged it as DEI. Fox agreed. Here’s how he explained it during the deposition. The lawyer reads aloud ChatGPT’s output and questions Fox about it:
“The documentary tells the story of the Colfax Massacre, the single greatest incident of anti-black violence during Reconstruction. And it’s historical and leg NAACP for black civil rights, Louisiana, the South, and in the nation as a whole.” Did I read that correctly?
Fox: Yes. Okay.
And then in column B right next to that, it says, “Yes, the documentary explores a historical event that significantly impacted black civil rights, making it relevant to the topic of DEI.” Did I read that correctly?
Fox: Yes.
Is it fair to say that what I just read is the ChatGPT output of the prompts in the first column?
Fox: Yes.
Okay. Do you agree with ChatGPT’s assessment here that a documentary is DEI if it explores historical events that significantly impacted black civil rights?
Fox:Yes.
Okay. Why would that be DEI?
Fox: It’s focused on a singular race. It is not for the benefit… It is not for the benefit of humankind. It is focused on a specific group of or a specific race here being black.
Why would learning about anti-black violence not be to the benefit of humankind.
Fox: That’s not what I’m saying.
Okay, then what are you saying?
Fox: I’m saying it relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
You said it’s not to the benefit of humankind. Right?
Fox: Is that what I said?
[Laughs] Yeah.
Then there was the documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust:
The grant description of column row 252 says, “Production of My Underground Mother, a feature-length documentary that explores the untold story of Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust through a daughter’s search for her late mother’s past, a collective camp diary in which she wrote and interviews with dozens of women survivors who reveal the gender-based violence they suffered and hit from their own families.” Did I read that correctly?
Fox: Yes.
Okay. And then in that row or column, you say “Yes DEI.” Did you write the rationale in that column?
Fox: Could you scroll over, Jacob?
Again, the rationale says, “The documentary addresses gender-based violence and overlooked histories contributing to DEI by amplifying marginalized voices.”
Fox: Yes.
Why is a documentary about Holocaust survivors DEI?
Fox: It’s the… gender-based… story… that’s inherently discriminatory to focus on this specific group.
It’s inherently discriminatory to focus on what specific group?
Fox: The gender-based so females… during the Holocaust.
And you believe that that’s inherently discriminatory?
Fox: I’m just saying that’s what it’s focused on.
Sure.
Fox: And this is related to the DEI.
Right. But you just use the term inherently discriminatory. What did you mean by that?
Fox: It’s focusing on DEI principles, gender being one of them.
So a documentary that’s about women would be DEI. Is that fair to say?
Fox: No.
Okay. So, tell me why what I just said isn’t DEI, but what you just said is DEI.
Fox: It’s a Jewish specifically focused on Jewish cultures and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture. It’s inherently related to DEI for those reasons.
Because it’s about Jewish culture?
Fox: Plus marginalized female voices during the Holocaust gender-based violence.
Okay. Is this… when we focus on a minority, is that your understanding that, you know, the Jewish people fall into the category of a minority?
Fox: Certainly a culture that could be described as minorities.
Okay. So, how did you go about determining what was a minority and what wasn’t a minority for the for the purpose of identifying DEI in grants?
Fox: Inherently focused on any ethnicity, culture, gender, no matter the sort of race or gender or or religion or… yeah.
So a documentary about anti-Black violence during Reconstruction is “not for the benefit of humankind.” A documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust is “inherently DEI” because it’s focused on “gender” or “religion.” But remember, the keyword list Fox built to scan grants included terms like “LGBTQ,” “homosexual,” “tribal,” “BIPOC,” “native,” and “immigrants.” Notably absent: “white,” “Caucasian,” or “heterosexual.” When pressed on this, Fox offered the defense that he “very well could have” included those terms but just… didn’t.
Now, about Nate Cavanaugh. If you haven’t heard of Cavanaugh, he’s the college dropout who co-founded an IP licensing startup, partnered with Fox on the DOGE work at NEH, and was subsequently appointed — I am not making this up — president of the U.S. Institute of Peace and acting director of the Interagency Council on Homelessness, among other roles. When asked about DEI in his own deposition, Cavanaugh provided what might be the most inadvertently self-aware definition imaginable. While obnoxiously chewing gum during the deposition, the following exchange took place:
What is DEI referring to here?
Cavanaugh: It stands for diversity, equity and inclusion.
And what is your opinion of diversity, equity, inclusion.
Cavanaugh: My personal opinion?
Well, let’s start with what does it mean to you?
Cavanaugh: It means diversity, equity, inclusion.
Well, that’s the label, but what does what do those words mean?
Cavanaugh: It means uh it means making decisions on a basis of something other than merit.
Irony alert: Nate Cavanaugh — a college dropout with no government experience, no background in the humanities, and no apparent understanding of the grants he was terminating — defined DEI as “decisions on the basis of something other than merit.” He said this while sitting in a deposition about his time holding multiple senior government positions for which he had no qualifications whatsoever. The lack of self-awareness is genuinely staggering.
And what did all of this actually accomplish? By Cavanaugh’s own admission, the deficit didn’t go down. Fox was asked about this too. From 404 Media:
When the attorney then asks if Fox would be surprised to hear if the overall deficit did not go down after DOGE’s actions, Fox says no. In his own deposition, Cavanaugh acknowledged the deficit did not go down.
“I have to believe that the dollars that were saved went to mission critical, non-wasteful spending, and so, again, in the broad macro: an unfortunate circumstance for an individual, but this is an effort for the administration,” Fox says. “In my opinion, what is certainly not wasteful is food stamps, healthcare, Medicare, Medicaid funding,” Fox says. Later he adds when discussing a specific cut grant: “those dollars could be getting put to something like food stamps or Medicaid for grandma in a rural county.”
There is no evidence these funds were directed in that way. The Trump administration has kicked millions of people off of food stamps. It has, just as an example, given ICE tens of billions of more dollars, though.
Sure, kiddo. It was all for grandma’s food stamps. (Though given Fox’s ideological priors, one suspects that food stamps themselves would end up on the ‘wasteful spending’ list soon enough.)
The NY Times piece also revealed some remarkable details about how the process played out internally. Acting NEH Chairman Michael McDonald, who had been at the agency for over two decades and could recall fewer than a half-dozen grant revocations in that entire time — all for failure to complete promised work — went along with the mass cancellation of nearly every active Biden-era grant. When DOGE’s process wasn’t moving fast enough, Fox emailed McDonald:
We’re getting pressure from the top on this and we’d prefer that you remain on our side but let us know if you’re no longer interested.
McDonald expressed some reservations, calling many of the grants slated for termination “harmless when it comes to promoting DEI.” But he rolled over:
“But you have also told us that in addition to canceling projects because they may promote DEI ideology, the DOGE Team also wishes to cancel funding to assist deficit reduction. Either way, as you’ve made clear, it’s your decision on whether to discontinue funding any of the projects on this list.”
Out of all grants approved during the Biden administration, only 42 were kept. The rest — 1,477 grants — were terminated. No appeals were allowed. Termination letters bore McDonald’s signature but were sent from an unofficial email address the DOGE employees created. McDonald himself admitted he didn’t draft the letters and couldn’t tell you how many grants were cut. And when pressed on whether the grants concerning the Colfax Massacre and the Holocaust were actually DEI, McDonald — who, unlike Fox and Cavanaugh, actually has a doctorate in literature — said he didn’t agree they were. But he signed off on their termination anyway.
Oh, and McDonald apparently didn’t even know Fox and Cavanaugh had used ChatGPT to make the determinations.
So that’s the substance. Two unqualified guys, a chatbot, a keyword list built on culture war grievances, and the destruction of a century-old institution’s grant portfolio in about two weeks. We covered the mechanics in February. The depositions just put it all on video, in their own words, in all its arrogant, ignorant glory.
And then the government decided it couldn’t handle the public seeing it.
After the plaintiff organizations uploaded the deposition videos to YouTube and shared materials with the press, the government filed an urgent letter asking the court to order the videos removed “from the internet” — yes, they actually used that phrasing — and to restrict the plaintiffs from further publicizing discovery materials. Their argument was that the videos “could subject the witnesses and their family members to undue harassment and reputational harm.”
A few days later, the government came back even more agitated, reporting that Fox had received death threats and that the videos had circulated widely, with “well over 100,000 X posts circulating and/or discussing video clips” of the depositions. The filing cited media coverage from People, HuffPost, 404 Media, and The Advocate.
“Unfortunately, that risk has now materialized—at least one witness has been subjected to significant harassment, including death threats. Accordingly, we respectfully request that the Court enter the requested order as soon as possible to minimize the risk of additional harm to the witnesses and their families.”
Death threats are genuinely bad and nobody should send them. Full stop. That said, let’s explore the breathtaking asymmetry for a moment.
Fox and Cavanaugh subjected more than 1,400 grant recipients to termination with no warning, no due process, no appeal, and effectively forged the director’s signature on the letters. They didn’t give an ounce of thought to the livelihoods they were destroying — the researchers mid-project, the documentary filmmakers, the archivists, the teachers, the organizations that had planned years of work around these grants. When asked if he felt any remorse, Fox said:
Sorry for those impacted, but there is a bigger problem, and that’s ultimately—the more important piece is reducing the government spend.
But now that people are being mean to them on the internet? Now, suddenly, the government needs an emergency protective order and the videos must be scrubbed from existence.
Judge Colleen McMahon did initially order the plaintiffs to “immediately take any and all possible steps to claw back the videos,” pending further briefing. The plaintiffs responded with an emergency motion pointing out a fairly important detail: the government never designated the deposition videos as confidential under the existing protective order. They had the opportunity to do so and didn’t. From the plaintiffs’ filing:
Defendants never designated the video depositions in question as Confidential under the Protective Order, and Defendants have never alleged in their correspondence with ACLS Plaintiffs that ACLS Plaintiffs violated the protective order presently in place.
In other words, the government had a mechanism to keep the videos under wraps. They chose not to use it. And now they want the court to do retroactively what they failed to do at the time.
The judge’s response to the emergency motion was delightfully terse:
DENIED.
See you Tuesday.
And then there’s the part where the government’s own filing accidentally makes the case for why these videos are important. In arguing that the plaintiffs were acting improperly, the government noted that the MLA’s website had links to the deposition videos alongside a link soliciting donations to its advocacy initiative:
Directly below these materials is a link soliciting monetary donations to the MLA’s advocacy initiative “Paving the Way.” To the extent the MLA or other ACLS Plaintiffs are publicizing these documents as part of their fundraising efforts, that is improper.
Which is an interesting argument to make when the entire lawsuit exists because DOGE used ChatGPT to destroy a hundred million dollars in humanities funding.
Now, finally, about those videos the government wanted removed “from the internet.” As anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes studying the history of online content suppression could have predicted, the attempt to get the videos taken down had precisely the opposite of its intended effect. The videos were backed up almost immediately to the Internet Archive, distributed as a torrent, and spread across social media. As 404 Media reported:
The news shows the difficulty in trying to remove material from the internet, especially that which has a high public interest and has already been viewed likely millions of times. It’s also an example of the “Streisand Effect,” a phenomenon where trying to suppress information often results in the information spreading further.
We’ve written about the Streisand Effect many, many times over the years here at Techdirt, and the pattern is always the same: someone sees something embarrassing about themselves online, panics, tries to make it go away, and in doing so ensures that orders of magnitude more people see it than ever would have otherwise. The government’s frantic filings, complete with citations to specific media articles and X post counts, served as a helpful reading list for anyone who hadn’t yet seen the videos.
The judge’s order, notably, only directed the plaintiffs to take down the videos. It said nothing about the Internet Archive, the torrent, the clips on X, the embeds in news articles, or the countless other copies that had already proliferated. And, really, given that none of the other sources are parties to the case, and the associated First Amendment concerns, it’s difficult to see those videos going away any time soon.
The government wanted the videos removed “from the internet.” They have now been seeded to the internet in a format specifically designed to be impossible to remove.
This is what happens when you try to suppress something the public has already decided it wants to see.
And that gets to the broader absurdity here. Fox and Cavanaugh walked into a federal agency they knew nothing about, used a chatbot to condemn more than a thousand grants they never read, created spreadsheets labeled “Craziest Grants” and “Other Bad Grants,” planned to highlight them on DOGE’s X account for culture war clout, sent termination letters with someone else’s signature from a private email server, and explicitly told the agency head that no appeals would be allowed.
When asked under oath to justify what they did, Fox couldn’t define DEI, couldn’t explain why documenting anti-Black violence isn’t “for the benefit of humankind,” and could only offer that the money they saved was probably going to food stamps for grandma — which it very much was not. Cavanaugh couldn’t define DEI either, acknowledged the deficit didn’t go down, and gave a definition of DEI that perfectly described his own role in the federal government.
These are the people who DOGE sent to reshape the government. And now that government is asking a federal judge for an emergency protective order because the internet is being kinda mean about it. Poor poor snowflake DOGE boys.
As the ACLS president put it, “DOGE employees’ use of ChatGPT to identify ‘wasteful’ grants is perhaps the biggest advertisement for the need for humanities education, which builds skills in critical thinking.”
She’s right. Though I’d argue watching these depositions is — unlike Fox’s ridiculously bigoted definition of Black history — very much for the benefit of humankind.
