Homicides across 35 major American cities fell 21% in 2025, amounting to 922 fewer people killed. Robberies dropped 23%. Gun assaults declined 22%. Carjackings plummeted 43%.
As a scholar focused on how policy decisions and structural conditions shape crime in marginalized communities, I see a pattern forming that could put these historic gains at serious risk.
The cuts stretched across the public safety landscape: community violence intervention, victim services, law enforcement training, juvenile justice, offender reentry and criminal justice research.
Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi described the cancellations as eliminating “wasteful grants.” The White House argued that the grant programs had been “funding DEI and cultural Marxism” rather than helping to keep Americans safe.
In rural Oregon, a DOJ grant had allowed the Union County district attorney to hire an investigator who, after a few years of probing a 43-year-old cold case involving the killing of a 21-year-old woman, finally developed some leads. When the money was cut, the investigation stopped.
Funding cliffs
The funding cuts couldn’t have come at a worse time. States and local jurisdictions were already facing looming cuts, as billions of dollars provided by President Joe Biden’s COVID recovery plan run out on Dec. 31, 2026.
Many local governments had used that money to build violence prevention programs from the ground up: employing community-based mediators, launching youth employment initiatives and expanding behavioral health teams.
And now? A double funding cliff with the sudden cancellation of DOJ grants, paired with the expiration of COVID recovery money.
In Chicago, this cliff has already forced a 43% cut to the city’s domestic violence prevention budget for 2026 – even as its share of domestic-related homicides rose 13% over the previous year.
Larger and more targeted
Criminology research helps explain the particular risks of abrupt disinvestment. Emory sociology professor Robert Agnew’s General Strain Theory identifies a direct relationship between increased strain – economic pressure, blocked opportunities, the withdrawal of institutional support – and higher risks of criminal behavior.
Historical precedent reinforces the concern. In 2013, federal across-the-board spending cuts eliminated services for more than 955,000 crime victims in a single year. The capacity of the FBI and related agencies was slashed by the equivalent of more than 1,000 agents.
Between 2014 and 2016, the violent crime rate climbed 7%.
The 2025 cuts are substantially larger and more targeted, and have devastated some groups.
Equal Justice USA, a national organization working to end the death penalty and reduce violence through community-based interventions, shut down in August 2025 after losing more than $3 million in DOJ grants.
“What shocked me the most … was what feels like the utter cruelty of it,” said Adam Rosenberg, who runs the center, referring to the cancellation of the funds.
As of April 2026, the DOJ has not paid out $200 million in approved grants to assist victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.
This comes after the department last year allowed more than 100 grants for human trafficking survivors to expire, affecting more than 5,000 victims, despite Congress allocating $88 million for these services.
Community members trained in conflict mediation help extinguish tensions before they turn lethal. Youth programs provide alternatives to street economies. Forensic labs process the evidence that solves cases. Reentry programs keep people from cycling back through the system. With each serving a distinct function, together they form the infrastructure of public safety.
As funding for crime prevention from two main sources runs out, whether progress continues depends on what happens next.
Back in early 2025, DOGE bros Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh were handed multiple government roles with a simple mandate: go find the woke stuff and kill it. Fox and Cavanaugh had zero relevant experience for any of it — at one point Cavanaugh, a twenty-something college dropout whose main prior credential was a patent startup, was put in charge of the United States Institute for Peace. One of their assignments was the National Endowment for the Humanities, which they apparently concluded was irredeemably woke and needed to go.
Their review process for millions of dollars in previously approved grants consisted almost entirely of asking ChatGPT this:
“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.”
And that was it. They then relied on the results of that as a reason to cancel millions of dollars in grants that had already gone through a detailed approval process. You’ll also recall, that these two bros who probably thought themselves masters of the universe in early 2025, flipped out that the plaintiffs in the case against them, the American Council of Learned Societies, put their depositions on YouTube, where you could see them unable to define DEI, and unable to try to defend why they canceled various grants for being woke. Turns out they didn’t like facing any scrutiny themselves.
Judge Colleen McMahon has now dropped a scathing 143-page ruling finding that feeding grants to ChatGPT and relying on its “why this is woke in 120 characters” output meets the “arbitrary and capricious” standard — making these cuts unlawful.
Fox testified that he did not define “DEI” for ChatGPT and that he did not have the slightest idea how ChatGPT understood the term…. Nor did Fox ask ChatGPT to factor in the purpose, methodology or scholarly substance of a project – which would have required familiarity with the underlying grant materials
Because the inquiry was framed only in terms of whether a project “relate[d] at all to DEI” (whatever that might mean to ChatGPT), projects whose abbreviated descriptions contained general references to “history,” “culture,” or “identity” were frequently identified by ChatGPT as relating to DEI. For example, a project to recover and analyze ancient writings attributed to Moses but excluded from the canonical Hebrew Bible and preserved in fragmentary form (e.g., the Book of Jubilees and the Testament of Moses) was classified as DEI because it claimed to “provide important insight into Jewish thought from two thousand years ago, complementary to insight from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament.”… The project description reflects a highly technical effort involving multispectral imaging, textual reconstruction, and the recovery of deteriorated source materials…. Yet, the assigned rationale consists of a single sentence linking the project to “Jewish thought,” which ChatGPT considered to be aligned with “DEI” goals.
The judge highlights some other whoppers as well:
nother grant supported a study of the Chinese government’s persecution of the Uyghur people. As described in the spreadsheet, the project documented surveillance practices, detention facilities, coercive assimilation policies, restrictions on language, religion, and cultural practice, and the effects of those policies on Uyghur communities in China and in the diaspora. In other words, the project concerned state policy, human-rights conditions, and the preservation of cultural and religious identity under conditions of repression by the Chinese government. Yet ChatGPT classified the project as “DEI,” Dkt. No. 248-11, at 22, apparently because it concerned the threatened erasure of a particular ethnic and religious group, albeit one located in a foreign country. Disfavoring this grant on “DEI” grounds, or any grounds, is especially difficult to square with the United States’ longstanding, bipartisan condemnation of China’s treatment of the Uyghurs, including during the first Trump Administration.
Judge McMahon clearly understands that ChatGPT is a “generate approximately what you want” engine, not a tool for deeply analyzing grant applications.
The record reflects that these ChatGPT determinations were generated without any additional context beyond the cursory spreadsheet descriptions themselves. 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.
This is one of the most frustrating things in lots of other stories about LLMs, in which the media and politicians and everyday users insist some sort of actual intelligence, thought, or intent behind outputs. When all any of them do is try to generate a plausible sounding response to your request. Judge McMahon understands that. And either Fox and Cavanaugh are too technically illiterate to understand that or, more likely, they didn’t give a shit. They just wanted to check boxes so they could cancel as many grants as they wanted.
ChatGPT is certainly good at doing your homework for you, though.
The only problem is that the law requires actual reasons and a real process for something like this — it can’t just be arbitrary. But feeding it to ChatGPT to give you the reasons why you can cancel these grants, is absolutely arbitrary.
There can be no serious dispute that the review process implemented by DOGE did not conform to, or even resemble, NEH’s ordinary grant-review process, which itself was designed to comply with the mandates of its authorizing statute. The statutory process contemplates individualized evaluation by subject-matter experts, advisory review, Council involvement, and final action by the Chairperson. See supra Sections I(A), (C). And once grants had been awarded, the Act does not authorize a wholesale post-award revocation based on new ideological criteria. Rather, for awards made under § 956(c), the Act provides for post-award evaluation, financial and project reporting, and potential termination only when the Chairperson determines that a recipient has substantially failed to satisfy the purposes for which the assistance was provided or the applicable statutory criteria.
DOGE’s process, by contrast, rested on abbreviated spreadsheet descriptions and a binary ChatGPT prompt asking whether each project “relate[d] at all to DEI.” Fox then folded the ChatGPT-generated rationales into the final spreadsheets used to identify grants for termination, thereby combining DOGE’s AI-generated classifications with NEH staff recommendations. … Nothing in the record suggests that NEH had ever before employed such a process before March 2025. And nothing in the authorizing statute permitted it.
There’s also the fact that DOGE has no authority to cut off these grants:
DOGE had no statutory authority to terminate NEH grants. And on the undisputed evidence, DOGE – not the NEH Chairperson or anyone else at NEH – effectuated the terminations at issue here.
This is not a case involving a routine disagreement over how to interpret a statute. Nonstatutory ultra vires claims are reserved for extraordinary cases in which “the agency action go[es] beyond mere legal or factual error and amount[s] to a clear departure by the [agency] from its statutory mandate.” … They require a showing that the agency “plainly acts in excess of its delegated powers and contrary to a specific prohibition in the statute that is clear and mandatory.”….
This case presents something more basic. It is not that DOGE misconstrued a statutory provision conferring authority on it; it is that Congress conferred no authority on DOGE at all with respect to the awarding, continuation, or termination of NEH grants.
The Supreme Court has made it clear that Congress — not the executive branch — has the power here. (Amusingly, the GOP loves to point this out, but only when Democrats are in the White House.)
The Executive Orders and DOGE-directed termination process did not carry out the NEH grantmaking scheme Congress prescribed by law in a duly enacted statute. They displaced it. Congress vested funding authority in the NEH Chairperson. DOGE substituted a presidential policy judgment for a statute duly enacted by Congress. That is not faithful execution of law
Judge McMahon even points out that the Trump administration’s posturing regarding DOGE in other cases is part of what sinks it in this case:
As the Solicitor General represented to the Supreme Court, “USDS [DOGE] is a presidential advisory body within the Executive Office of the President” and “USDS has no organic statute and is not created by Congress.” Appl. to Stay Pending Certiorari or Mandamus and Request for Immediate Administrative Stay at 5, 21, In re U.S. DOGE Serv., No. 24A1122 (emphasis added). If DOGE “has no organic statute and is not created by Congress,” then it necessarily lacks any statutory delegation of authority to terminate NEH grants. And it certainly cannot exercise such authority in derogation of the very purposes that Congress wrote into the agency’s authorizing statute.
The court goes on to explain that an executive order simply cannot overrule Congress, but more to the point, Trump’s executive order setting up DOGE in the first place itself admits that it doesn’t have the powers it sought to exercise in cancelling these grants.
… the Executive Orders, read on their own terms, confirm the absence of any operative grant-termination authority in DOGE. Executive Order 14158, Establishing and Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” first creates the principal DOGE entity by renaming the United States Digital Service as the “United States DOGE Service (USDS)” and providing that it “shall be established in the Executive Office of the President.” Exec. Order No. 14158 § 3(a), 90 Fed. Reg. at 8441. It then separately creates, “within USDS,” a “temporary organization known as ‘the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization’” and states that this temporary organization is created “in accordance with section 3161 of title 5, United States Code.” Id., § 3(b), 90 Fed. Reg. at 8441. But the only reference to a statute in the Order – to 5 U.S.C. § 3161 – attaches to the temporary organization, not to the principal DOGE entity.
Section 3161 itself does not confer any substantive policymaking power on DOGE. It defines a “temporary organization” as an organization “established by law or Executive order for a specific period not in excess of three years for the purpose of performing a specific study or other project,” and grants personnel, detail, compensation, and travel authority to staff such an organization. 5 U.S.C. § 3161(a)–(e). Nothing in that provision authorizes DOGE to exercise independent executive power, direct the functioning of a federal agency, terminate grants, halt payments, or impose binding decisions on statutory officers. At most, it permits the creation and staffing of a temporary body for a “specific study or other project.”
Pointing to another DOGE EO, the judge points out that the federal government has publicly stated that DOGE was only to have an advisory role. But all of the details here show that the two bros were absolutely in charge (frequently overruling the staffers ostensibly in charge).
DOGE Teams – including those in which individuals such as Justin Fox or Nate Cavanaugh serve – are expressly created “within” agencies and function to “advise” agency heads – not to exercise independent decisionmaking authority.
And the evidence is overwhelming that Cavanaugh and Fox were not “advising.” They were ordering.
Any suggestion that DOGE merely advised NEH is belied by the undisputed record. They did not simply provide policy advice for NEH leadership to accept or reject after their review. Before ever meeting with NEH leadership, Fox had already begun reviewing NEH grants using keyword searches and DOGE-generated categories to identify grants he considered objectionable. DOGE then used ChatGPT-generated “DEI” rationales, combined those classifications with NEH staff ratings, and generated the final spreadsheets used to identify grants for termination. See supra Sections I(E)–(G). Cavanaugh and Fox then “both rejected [the NEH Chair’s] recommendation” to continue funding certain grants, Dkt. No. 276-1, Cavanaugh Dep., 181:3–9, and added still more grants for termination – grants that NEH staff had identified as “N/A” – on the eve of the April 2, 2025 mass termination, Dkt. No. 248-32, US-000041206. The appearance of Chairperson McDonald’s name on the termination letters does not alter the substance of what occurred. Fox, not McDonald, drafted and sent the termination notices under McDonald’s name.
Just days before the Mass Termination, Fox told McDonald, “We need a game plan for effectuating . . . final grant terminations and contract cancellations by tomorrow AM. We will carry these plans out before the end of the week. 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.” Dkt. No. 248-15, Ex. 15, US-000050717 (emphasis added). That is not the language of an adviser awaiting a decision from the statutory decisionmaker. Fox told McDonald that “we” (i.e., Fox and Cavanaugh) would carry the terminations out, invoked “pressure from the top” (i.e., the White House), and framed McDonald’s participation as simply optional. See Dkt. No. 248-1, Fox Dep., 305:8–17. His reference to whether McDonald was “no longer interested” makes clear that DOGE understood the terminations would proceed with or without him. No reasonable factfinder could read that communication as evidence of a “purely advisory” role. Fox’s message leaves no serious doubt about who was directing the process.
In other words, Justin Fox’s faux tough-guy “I’m in charge here” attitude is a big part of what sank this case. These guys were so full of their own shit, and so uninterested in how government actually works, that they effectively blew up their legal position by simply being assholes.
The record admits of only one conclusion. DOGE was calling the shots. DOGE controlled the lists, DOGE rejected McDonald’s suggestions, DOGE added additional grants for termination, DOGE drafted and sent the notices, and DOGE dictated which previously awarded grants would live or die. McDonald’s one and only decision – to allow his name to appear at the bottom of the termination letters – alters none of that. His signature did not transform DOGE’s decision into an NEH decision; his name was simply a fig leaf designed to make it appear like the official authorized by law to terminate grants was the official who had done so. If DOGE were in fact limited to an advisory role, Fox and Cavanaugh could not have directed NEH to terminate specific grants over the objections of its Chair. But they did. And they did so, without any statutory delegation of power. The challenged conduct cannot be reconciled with the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act or the constitutional requirement that executive action be grounded in lawful authority. It cannot stand.
Beyond these problems, the Court notes, the grant cancellations also were a clear First Amendment violation, given that the cancelled grants were chosen because of their expression being too woke, which is clearly targeting speech for what it says.
In sum, while the government retains some discretion in administering grant programs, that discretion is bounded by the First Amendment. It may define programmatic objectives and allocate resources accordingly, but it may not deny or withdraw funding because it disagrees with the ideas expressed. “[I]deologically driven attempts to suppress a particular point of view are presumptively unconstitutional[.]” Rosenberger, 515 U.S. at 830. Where, as here, the government funds a program that facilitates private expression, it may not act where “the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction.”
And here, there’s very clear viewpoint discrimination:
DEI is, of course, a viewpoint….
The record establishes that the termination decisions were driven by an expressly ideological method of classification. There can be no genuine dispute about this point. Indeed, the Government has all but admitted as much….
And thus, the cancellations were based on viewpoint, which violates the First Amendment:
Regardless of whether DOGE’s classifications were coherent (obviously, many of them were not), what matters is that it deliberately sought to single out and eliminate grants based on its perception that they implicated disfavored ideas. See Dkt. No. 248-17, Ex. 17, NEH_AR_000013 (“[W]e have only excluded [from termination] the ones that seem not to conflict with the Administration’s priorities[.]”). The Government’s actions cannot stand. It may not “restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others.” Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 48–49 (1976) (per curiam)
Indeed, the judge notes that the White House literally bragged about cancelling these grants because of their perceived viewpoint:
The Government, for its part, has never claimed that these grants were reviewed for their humanistic merit or that they were terminated for any reason other than the DOGE decisionmakers’ perception that they espoused, reflected, or related to the disfavored “DEI” viewpoint. To the contrary, the Government admits that these grants were terminated because they were deemed to promote DEI…. DOGE itself publicly characterized the terminations as “DEI,” posting from its official account on X (formerly Twitter) that “During the previous administration, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded the following grants to spend taxpayer dollars, all of which have been cancelled ($163M in overall savings). NEH grants will be merit-based and awarded to non-DEI, pro-America causes.”… The Government’s own public statements confirm what the record otherwise makes clear: DEI, the disfavored viewpoint, was the reason why the majority of Plaintiffs’ grants were terminated. The Government engaged in blatant viewpoint discrimination.
Then there was the political discrimination. Apparently the DOGE crew asked to only look at grants from the Biden admin, which the court notes is impermissible. While it correctly states that new administrations are allowed to set their own priorities, it cannot claw back previously granted money entirely on the basis of disfavored speech or political association.
The Court is under no illusion that a new administration may prefer, on a going-forward basis, to fund certain kinds of scholarly programs over others. But lawful priority-setting is one thing; depriving someone of a benefit previously conferred based on viewpoint and perceived political association is something else entirely. Consistent with Regan and Rust, a new administration may pursue lawful funding priorities within the bounds of the NEH statute and the Constitution. But it has no license to suppress disfavored ideas.
Fox and Cavanaugh walked into a federal agency, fired up ChatGPT, and apparently assumed that generating plausible-sounding bureaucratic language was the same thing as following the law. It wasn’t. A 143-page ruling says so in considerable detail. The government can set its funding priorities. It cannot, however, use a chatbot to manufacture pretextual rationales for suppressing ideas it dislikes, hand authority to people Congress never authorized, and then put a fig leaf signature on the termination letters and call it a day.
They were cosplaying as government while dismantling it from the inside. And at least in this court, they didn’t get away with it.
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.
Surveillance technology vendors, federal agencies, and wealthy private donors have long helped provide local law enforcement “free” access to surveillance equipment that bypasses local oversight. The result is predictable: serious accountability gaps and data pipelines to other entities, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), that expose millions of people to harm.
The collection and sharing of our data quietly generates detailed records of people’s movements and associations that can be exposed, hacked, or repurposed without their knowledge or consent. Those records weaken sanctuary and First Amendment protections while facilitating the targeting of vulnerable people.
Cities can and should use their power to reject federal grants, vendor trials, donations from wealthy individuals, or participation in partnerships that facilitate surveillance and experimentation with spy tech.
If these projects are greenlit, oversight is imperative. Mechanisms like public hearings, competitive bidding, public records transparency, and city council supervision aid to ensure these acquisitions include basic safeguards — like use policies, audits, and consequences for misuse — to protect the public from abuse and from creeping contracts that grow into whole suites of products.
Clear policies and oversight mechanisms must be in place before using any surveillance tools, free or not, and communities and their elected officials must be at the center of every decision about whether to bring these tools in at all.
Here are some of the most common methods “free” surveillance tech makes its way into communities.
Trials and Pilots
Police departments are regularly offered free access to surveillance tools and software through trials and pilot programs that often aren’t accompanied by appropriate use policies. In many jurisdictions, trials do not trigger the same requirements to go before decision-makers outside the police department. This means the public may have no idea that a pilot program for surveillance technology is happening in their city.
In Denver, Colorado, the police department is running trials of possible unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for a drone-as-first-responder (DFR) program from two competing drone vendors: Flock Safety Aerodome drones (through August 2026) and drones from the company Skydio, partnering with Axon, the multi-billion dollar police technology company behind tools like Tasers and AI-generated police reports. Drones create unique issues given their vantage for capturing private property and unsuspecting civilians, as well as their capacity to make other technologies, like ALPRs, airborne.
Functional, Even Without Funding
We’ve seen cities decide not to fund a tool, or run out of funding for it, only to have a company continue providing it in the hope that money will turn up. This happened in Fall River, Massachusetts, where the police department decided not to fund ShotSpotter’s $90,000 annual cost and its frequent false alarms, but continued using the system when the company provided free access.
Importantly, police technology companies are developing more features and subscription-based models, so what’s “free” today frequently results in taxpayers footing the bill later.
Gifts from Police Foundations and Wealthy Donors
Police foundations and the wealthy have pushed surveillance-driven agendas in their local communities by donating equipment and making large monetary gifts, another means of acquiring these tools without public oversight or buy-in.
In Atlanta, the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) attempted to use its position as a private entity to circumvent transparency. Following a court challenge from the Atlanta Community Press Collective and Lucy Parsons Labs, a Georgia court determined that the APF must comply with public records laws related to some of its actions and purchases on behalf of law enforcement. In San Francisco, billionaire Chris Larsen has financially supported a supercharging of the city’s surveillance infrastructure, donating $9.4 million to fund the San Francisco Police Department’s (SFPD) Real-Time Investigation Center, where a menu of surveillance technologies and data come together to surveil the city’s residents. This move comes after the billionaire backed a ballot measure, which passed in March 2025, eroding the city’s surveillance technology law and allowing the SFPD free rein to use new surveillance technologies for a full year without oversight.
Free Tech for Federal Data Pipelines
Federal grants and Department of Homeland Security funding are another way surveillance technology appears free to, only to lock municipalities into long‑term data‑sharing and recurring costs.
Through the Homeland Security Grant Program, which includes the State Homeland Security Program (SHSP) and the Urban Areas Security (UASI) Initiative, and Department of Justice programs like Byrne JAG, the federal government reimburses states and cities for “homeland security” equipment and software, including including law‑enforcement surveillance tools, analytics platforms, and real‑time crime centers. Grant guidance and vendor marketing materials make clear that these funds can be used for automated license plate readers, integrated video surveillance and analytics systems, and centralized command‑center software—in other words, purchases framed as counterterrorism investments but deployed in everyday policing.
Vendors have learned to design products around this federal money, pitching ALPR networks, camera systems, and analytic platforms as “grant-ready” solutions that can be acquired with little or no upfront local cost. Motorola Solutions, for example, advertises how SHSP and UASI dollars can be used for “law enforcement surveillance equipment” and “video surveillance, warning, and access control” systems. Flock Safety, partnering with Lexipol, a company that writes use policies for law enforcement, offers a “License Plate Readers Grant Assistance Program” that helps police departments identify federal and state grants and tailor their applications to fund ALPR projects.
Grant assistance programs let police chiefs fast‑track new surveillance: the paperwork is outsourced, the grant eats the upfront cost, and even when there is a formal paper trail, the practical checks from residents, councils, and procurement rules often get watered down or bypassed.
On paper, these systems arrive “for free” through a federal grant; in practice, they lock cities into recurring software, subscription, and data‑hosting fees that quietly turn into permanent budget lines—and a lasting surveillance infrastructure—as soon as police and prosecutors start to rely on them. In Santa Cruz, California, the police department explicitly sought to use a DHS-funded SHSP grant to pay for a new citywide network of Flock ALPR cameras at the city’s entrances and exits, with local funds covering additional cameras. In Sumner, Washington, a $50,000 grant was used to cover the entire first year of a Flock system — including installation and maintenance — after which the city is on the hook for roughly $39,000 every year in ongoing fees. The free grant money opens the door, but local governments are left with years of financial, political, and permanent surveillance entanglements they never fully vetted.
The most dangerous cost of this “free” funding is not just budgetary; it is the way it ties local systems into federal data pipelines. Since 9/11, DHS has used these grant streams to build a nationwide network of at least 79–80 state and regional fusion centers that integrate and share data from federal, state, local, tribal, and private partners. Research shows that state fusion centers rely heavily on the DHS Homeland Security Grant Program (especially SHSP and UASI) to “mature their capabilities,” with some centers reporting that 100 percent of their annual expenditures are covered by these grants.
Civil rights investigations have documented how this funding architecture creates a backdoor channel for ICE and other federal agencies to access local surveillance data for their own purposes. A recent report by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) describes ICE agents using a Philadelphia‑area fusion center to query the city’s ALPR network to track undocumented drivers in a self‑described sanctuary city.
Ultimately, federal grants follow the same script as trials and foundation gifts: what looks “free” ends up costing communities their data, their sanctuary protections, and their power over how local surveillance is used.
Protecting Yourself Against “Free” Technology
The most important protection against “free” surveillance technology is to reject it outright. Cities do not have to accept federal grants, vendor trials, or philanthropic donations. Saying no to “free” tech is not just a policy choice; it is a political power that local governments possess and can exercise. Communities and their elected officials can and should refuse surveillance systems that arrive through federal grants, vendor pilots, or private donations, regardless of how attractive the initial price tag appears.
For those cities that have already accepted surveillance technology, the imperative is equally clear: shut it down. When a community has rejected use of a spying tool, the capabilities, equipment, and data collected from that tool should be shut off immediately. Full stop.
And for any surveillance technology that remains in operation, even temporarily, there must be clear rules: when and how equipment is used, how that data is retained and shared, who owns data and how companies can access and use it, transparency requirements, and consequences for any misuse and abuse.
“Free” surveillance technology is never free. Someone profits or gains power from it. Police technology vendors, federal agencies, and wealthy donors do not offer these systems out of generosity; they offer them because surveillance serves their interests, not ours. That is the real cost of “free” surveillance.
We’ve long noted how the 2021 infrastructure bill included $42.5 billion for broadband grants dubbed the Broadband, Equity, Access And Deployment (BEAD) program. The program wasn’t without its warts, but it had the potential to be truly transformative for U.S. broadband access.
But Republicans illegally rewrote the program to redirect money away from stuff like affordable, gigabit, community fiber, and into the pockets of billionaire Elon Musk. In exchange for congested, expensive, Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite broadband access the company planned to deploy anyway.
This alone was a pretty big grift. But Trump has also threatened to illegally withhold planed state broadband grants if they dare try to make sure the resulting taxpayer broadband is affordable, or attempt to hold companies accountable for failing to delivered promised service.
“The concessions sought by SpaceX “would limit Starlink’s performance obligations, payment schedules, non-compliance penalties, reporting expectations, and labor and insurance standards,” wrote Drew Garner, director of policy engagement at the Benton Institute. Garner argued that SpaceX’s demands illustrate problems in how the Trump NTIA rewrote program rules to increase reliance on low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite providers.”
So basically Musk — who likes to pretend he hates subsidies despite his entire existence being propped up by them — wants untold billions in new subsidies and no serious way for his company to be held accountable should it fail to deliver the promised, substandard product.
Under a functional broadband grant program, states would push fiber as deeply into rural communities as possible, ideally in the form of “open access” fiber networks that generate local competition and challenge regional monopolies by dramatically lowering the cost of market entry. From there, you’d address the rest of the gaps using fixed wireless and 5G.
Only then would you fill in the remaining holes with Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite broadband options like Starlink, which are ideally suited only for the most remote areas (and even then, Starlink is generally too expensive for most of the lower-income rural Americans who really need it).
Republicans have, in an open act of corruption, thrown this entire logic on its head to curry favor with their favorite white supremacist extremist billionaire. They’re prioritizing Elon Musk’s substandard satellite network (which will only become more congested as more people use it), then ensuring nobody can meaningful hold Musk accountable when he inevitably fails to deliver reliable, affordable access.
Who is going to hold Musk accountable if he fails to deliver? Trump’s bootlicker at the FCC, Brendan Carr? The FTC, where Trump illegally fired all the Dem Commissioners? The NTIA, which is now run by a former Ted Cruz staffer who thinks affordable fiber optic broadband is “woke?” States, who risk losing out on a generational influx of subsidies if they challenge Elon Musk’s greed or stand up to telecoms?
Musk’s DOGE was always about destroying the regulatory state so he and other billionaires could sell the country for scrap off the back loading dock under the pretense of innovative efficiencies while being slathered with tax cuts and subsides. It’s grotesque, historic levels of corruption in a fucking hat.
The business and telecom press (and many folks in policy circles) have also already seemingly normalized hijacking a massive subsidy program to the benefit of a white supremacist billionaire. But as somebody that’s been studying the challenges of broadband access for a quarter century, I guarantee that we’re going to be documenting the damage (and lost potential) of this corruption for decades to come.
As RFK Jr. continues to dismantle public health in this country policy brick by policy brick, there have fortunately been some consistent sources of sanity for the public to turn to. One of those sources has been the American Academy of Pediatrics, an important organization that provides guidance and dispenses funds to healthcare professionals and researchers to provide for the public health of American children writ large. Because the AAP is made up of medical professionals that are sane, it has been a vocal critic of many of Kennedy’s policy decisions, particularly when it comes to Kennedy’s war on childhood vaccines and his misinformation about autism.
While Kennedy used to fashion himself a liberal, he has become a remarkably quick learner when it comes to the finer points of facism from his boss. His latest move is downright Trumpian: HHS has yanked back millions in approved grants to the AAP.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has canceled millions of dollars in grants awarded to the American Academy of Pediatrics, it said on Wednesday, including ones the group said were aimed at reducing sudden infant death and early detection of autism.
The move comes as the AAP, a vocal critic of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., challenged vaccine policies enacted under his leadership in federal court. Kennedy, a longtime critic of vaccines, has accused the organization of accepting funding from drug and vaccine makers to further their interests.
“These grants, previously awarded to the American Academy of Pediatrics, were canceled along with a number of other grants to other organizations because they no longer align with the Department’s mission or priorities,” an HHS spokesperson said.
SID and autism detection are the headliners and for good reason. This is a cruel move that will likely result in some increase in the deaths of babies. It also takes away detection of Kennedy’s favorite hobbyhorse in autism spectrum diagnoses. Those are two things that Kennedy claims to very much care about, yet here we are.
But those aren’t the only things those grants funded. There are also things like mental health services and healthcare access in rural areas, the latter of which tend to be Trump territory. It seems that those who voted for Trump often times are his preferred victims.
CEO Mark Del Monte explains how bad this is and what they try to do about it.
“The sudden withdrawal of these funds will directly impact and potentially harm infants, children, youth, and their families in communities across the United States,” said Del Monte, adding that the group is assessing its options, including potential legal action.
No explanation I can find has been given for these clawbacks of previously approved grants. In lieu of such an explanation, we can but speculate, and the most reasonable speculation out there is that Kennedy is big mad that AAP has disagreed with him, and denounced him, at times. And so he punished American children and rural areas in desperate need of more access to healthcare.
He’s an egomaniac, in other words. And while that sure does make him fit in nice and comfy in the Trump administration, he remains likely the worst HHS Secretary in its nearly 50 years of existence.
The Trump administration is promising to block billions in already-awarded infrastructure bill broadband grants to any states that enforce net neutrality or try to impose any sort of meaningful oversight on the country’s unpopular, predatory broadband monopolies.
That was the promise of Commerce Department official Arielle Roth, a former Ted Cruz staffer now in charge of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Roth made the comments about the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment grants (BEAD) at a recent speech at the Hudson Institute, a far right wing think tank:
“Specifically, any state receiving BEAD funds must exempt BEAD providers throughout their state footprint from broadband-specific economic regulations, such as price regulation and net neutrality.”
The infrastructure bill set aside $42.5 billion in BEAD broadband grants to be doled out and managed by individual states. It took several years to get this money rolling out, in part, because state and federal governments had to remap the entirety of broadband access in the United States in a bid to avoid repeating past subsidy scandals and make sure the money was spent semi-wisely.
This introduced all manner of new delays to the program, ironically after Republicans (with Ezra Klein’s help) spent much of last election season whiningvery loudly about the fact this BEAD program was taking too long to deliver broadband.
Again, this money had already been awarded after years of expensive planning. States have already been forced to spend even more money to revamp plans to make Trump officials happy. Yet the Trump administration keeps fiddling with the rules and weakening core definitions (for stuff like “broadband” and “unserved,”) ensuring that fewer and fewer locations qualify for assistance and states are left constantly on their heels trying to please our mad king and his army of weird zealots.
Now, the Trump administration is also trying to leverage the funding to bully states away from engaging in even basic oversight of companies like Comcast, AT&T, Charter, or Verizon.
If you recall, the Trump administration destroyed net neutrality (some modest rules trying to keep telecom monopolies from abusing their market power to harm competitors and consumers). And they’re destroying whatever was left of FCC oversight of telecom monopolies. With federal oversight gutted, now they’re taking aim at the handful of states that have tried to fill the consumer protection void.
The original Trump net neutrality repeal also tried to ban states from imposing net neutrality rules. But even our broken-ass courts repeatedly found that to be patently illegal (the federal government can’t abdicate its responsibility on consumer protection, then tell states what to do). You know, the very sort of “state rights” Republicans and Libertarian “free market” think tankers used to pretend to support.
But while a handful of states do have net neutrality rules, nobody has bothered to enforce them. In part because states — already facing a cavalcade of legal battles in the Trump era — aren’t keen to pick yet another major fight with big corporations they might lose. And they’re even less likely to do so now, with billions in potential infrastructure funding on the line.
But the key point I’ve always made is that this goes well beyond net neutrality. ISPs don’t want to just kill “net neutrality,” they want zero oversight whatsoever. So they can rip off U.S. consumers with impunity and face absolutely zero meaningful federal or state repercussion. And it’s a fight the telecom lobby is most certainly winning. Trump 2.0 is delivering the killing blow.
The United States is, it cannot be overstated, literally too corrupt to do the absolute bare minimum on corporate oversight, consumer protection, antitrust reform, or health market protection. This fact gets buried by a lot of bluster and bullshit about how fabulously innovative we are.
And because there’s so much other terrible shit going on, and because the press and public generally find infrastructure boring, this sort of rank corruption and regulatory capture is allowed to fly under the radar. But the long term impact, like most Trump policies, will be decidedly ugly.
In theory, the nice thing about having a Supreme Court is that it provides some level of legal certainty. You know how the system works: lower courts make decisions based on law and precedent, parties can appeal, and eventually the highest court issues careful, reasoned opinions that other courts can follow. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s a system.
The less nice thing is when the Supreme Court decides that systems are for suckers.
Last month we wrote about how the Supreme Court’s shadow docket had become a “lawless, explanation-free rubber stamp for Trump’s authoritarian agenda.” This wasn’t about policy disagreements. Or even disagreements about legal interpretations. It was about how the majority on the Supreme Court was using the “emergency relief” docket (the shadow docket) to issue explanation-free, unbriefed, consequential rulings (only in one direction) and then expecting anyone to know what the law actually is.
We had warned how John Roberts was guaranteeing that the Court would be kept busy all summer with these shadow docket rulings, and that is exactly what has happened. The pattern is straightforward: lower courts try to enforce existing law, the administration appeals on an emergency basis, and the Supreme Court says “okay, sure, let Trump do what he wants” with zero legal explanation. The only coherent principle seems to be “it’s okay if Trump does it.”
This is, let’s be clear, not how judicial systems are supposed to work. But Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has been calling this out with increasing directness. She’s not mincing words. She’s not worried about collegiality. And now she’s given us the perfect term for what’s happening. She’s added Calvinball to the SCOTUS lexicon:
In a broader sense, however, today’s ruling is of a piece with this Court’s recent tendencies. “[R]ight when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,” the Court opts instead to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious Government action as difficult as possible…..This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.
Calvinball, of course, is the favored pastime of Calvin from Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. And, yes, the point is that there are no rules.
The somewhat prescient Oxford English Dictionary added it to the dictionary just a few months ago, apparently recognizing how widely it’s been used to describe courts these days. I’ve certainly been using it to describe various judicial adventures of late, so it’s satisfying to see Justice Jackson make it official.
Jackson’s diagnosis cuts deeper than just this particular case. She’s identifying a systemic problem: a Court that has abandoned legal reasoning in favor of reaching predetermined outcomes, then wrapping those outcomes in enough procedural complexity that nobody can quite pin down what the rules actually are.
It almost doesn’t matter what this case is about, because it’s the principle about how the Supreme Court is now creating massively consequential binding precedent without the basic fundamentals of a thorough judicial process with things like full briefing or oral arguments.
But just for clarity: the case itself was about whether NIH could terminate nearly a billion dollars in grants. A district court judge had said (using actual reasoning and legal precedent) that NIH had to continue providing the money it had already promised and budgeted, noting that halting such payments violated the Administrative Procedure Act’s prohibition against “arbitrary and capricious” government actions. Straightforward stuff, really.
Unlike some shadow docket rulings, there were at least some explanations given here, though nothing you’d call illuminating. Four useless paragraphs basically just say the lower court’s ruling is stayed. Then there are various concurrences and dissents (and partial concurrences and partial dissents) that make it clear nobody quite agrees on what they’re doing, though much of it involves arguing over how much precedent an earlier shadow docket ruling (with basically zero explanation) should have on later shadow docket decisions.
Which maybe should have been a hint that this is a case that needs full briefing before making such consequential decisions about it.
And the lineup underscores the point: Justice Barrett would partially grant the stay; Chief Justice Roberts with Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson would deny it entirely; Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh would grant it entirely. If you’re keeping score of this Calvinball game, that’s a three-way split on an “emergency” order, with Barrett’s split vote winning the day—exactly the kind of messy, disputed ruling that demands full briefing.
It’s like watching people argue about the rules of a game while they’re making up the rules as they go along—and their only guiding principle is “well, we know who has to win.” Which, Jackson points out, is basically what’s happening. This creates what she calls a “jurisdictional maze” where plaintiffs can challenge government policies in one court but can’t get relief in the same court—effectively gutting the Administrative Procedure Act’s protections against arbitrary government action.
Justice Jackson’s key contribution is highlighting just how lawless it all is. She calls out how she warned about how this would play out, and the fact that the majority on SCOTUS views these (again, unbriefed and mostly unexplained) rulings as binding across the country is terrifying:
I viewed the Court’s intervention then—in an emergency stay posture, while racing against a fast-expiring temporary restraining order—as “equal parts unprincipled and unfortunate.”…
As it turns out, the Court’s decision was an even bigger mistake than I realized. The Court’s reasoning in California was not only “at the least under-developed, and very possibly wrong,” id., at ___ (KAGAN, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 1), but also evidently resolved more than the jurisdictional dispute over the particular education-related grants at issue in that case. Today’s decision reveals California’s considerable wingspan: That case’s ipse dixit now apparently governs all APA challenges to grant-funding determinations that the Government asks us to address in the context of an emergency stay application. A half paragraph of reasoning (issued without full briefing or any oral argument) thus suffices here to partially sustain the Government’s abrupt cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to support life-saving biomedical research.
The theory behind the shadow docket is pretty simple. Sometimes you need emergency relief to maintain the status quo while the regular judicial process works: full briefing, oral arguments, careful deliberation, the whole thing. The emergency docket exists so that irreversible harm doesn’t happen while everyone’s figuring out the right answer.
But what’s been happening is the opposite. Rather than preserving the status quo, the Court has been allowing—encouraging, really—irreversible changes to happen, without bothering to understand the issues or explain the reasoning.
And now they’re saying that these brain fart decisions based on zero details or due process, should be deemed the supreme law of the land? Jackson is having none of it:
The Court alsolobs this grenade without evaluating Congress’s intent or the profound legal and practical consequencesof this ruling. Stated simply: With potentially life-saving scientific advancements on the line, the Court turns a nearly century-old statute aimed at remedying unreasoned agency decision-making into a gauntlet rather than a refuge. But we have no business erecting a novel jurisdictional barrier to judicial review— especially when it appears nowhere in the relevant statutes and makes little sense.
This is not how judicial systems work, if you want them to remain judicial systems.
The majority is pretty explicit in their view that these unbriefed, unargued, unexplained shadow docket orders should bind everyone. Gorsuch, in his concurrence, doesn’t hold back:
… when this Court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts…. regardless of a decision’s procedural posture, its “reasoning—its ratio decidendi”—carries precedential weight in “future cases.”
This is the judicial equivalent of an angry father, challenged by a child regarding a rule, retorting with “because I say so, and I’m the man of the house.”
It’s exactly how children (and aggrieved parties) lose respect for the rules.
Look, it’s entirely possible that after full briefing and oral arguments, the Supreme Court would reach the same result. That would be annoying for other reasons, but at least there would have been due process and a chance for all relevant parties to be fully heard. That’s how it’s supposed to work. You do the analysis, you explain the reasoning, you create precedent that other courts can follow.
What the Roberts Court has been doing is the opposite. John Roberts himself sided with the dissenters here, but he’s presided over a court that has decided outcomes matter more than process. The result is a system where “just give Trump what he wants” has become the only reliable principle.
Calvinball.
What was once a respected judicial system has become a comic strip punch line. At least Calvin had the excuse of being six years old.
Their changes are twofold: one, they want to strip away requirements that the resulting taxpayer-funded broadband is (gasp) affordable to poor people. Two, they want to slather Elon Musk’s low-earth-orbit satellite service Starlink with billions in new subsidies, redirecting that money away from other, higher-capacity, better alternatives (like community-owned open access fiber).
Speaking last week to a Senate Appropriations Committee, Trump administration Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirmed that the NTIA will “soon” issue a new Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) that states will have 90 days to respond to. That will require states to basically reboot years of work in developing their state broadband plans, something outside groups say could take years.
It’s important to understand that numerous states were just a few steps away from deploying next-generation fiber to communities that had never had internet access before when Republicans decided they’d “fix” the program by shifting billions in funds to Elon Musk’s expensive, congested, environmentally problematic satellite service. This while the press writes numerous stories about “Elon Musk leaving politics” and he and Donald Trump have their public falling out (which has now been more muted).
The Western Governor’s Association was quick to send a polite letter to Lutnick noting that “significant required alterations to state and territory plans could cause further delays by up to 12 months,” which again seems like a generous estimation. Senate Democrats also wrote a very polite May 30 letter to Lutnick lamenting the unnecessary delays:
“States have already developed plans to address these needs, and restarting or slowing down the process will only hold back progress,” the Democrats’ letter said. “States must maintain the flexibility to choose the highest quality broadband options, rather than be forced by bureaucrats in Washington to funnel funds to Elon Musk’s Starlink, which lacks the scalability, reliability, and speed of fiber or other terrestrial broadband solutions.”
When the former boss of the BEAD program, Evan Feinman, left his post in March he noted how numerous states were just steps away from launching their massive fiber expansions. Feinman wasn’t subtle about his belief that the revisions are a cronyistic hand out to Elon Musk that will actually harm the goal of bringing affordable, reliable, and fast internet access to the masses.
“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” Feinman said.
The original BEAD program prioritized fiber investment because high-capacity, future proof fiber is the best use of taxpayer money. Ideally you want to drive fiber into as many areas as possible, then fill in the rest with 5G wireless and fixed wireless. After that, you can fill in any remaining gaps with LEO satellite broadband options.
Again though, LEO satellite lacks the capacity to scale to actually address U.S. broadband gaps, and is too expensive for the rural Americans most in need of access. Not only is Starlink expensive and increasingly congested, it harms scientific research and there’s evidence that the disposable nature of the satellites as they burn up in orbit may ultimately erode the ozone layer.
But because Elon Musk runs the company, Republicans think Starlink is some kind of magic. Unfortunately for many Trump supporters, money directed to Starlink is money directed away from better options, including the cooperatives, city-owned utilities, and municipal broadband operations providing locals gigabit fiber, sometimes for as little as $55 a month.
“What this probably means is that most states will have to re-write their grant proposals and rerun their grant programs from scratch, and then NTIA will have to approve them,” Gigi Sohn, the Director for the American Association for Public Broadband, said in a post to LinkedIn. “This makes disbursement in 7 months largely a fantasy.”
In its place is basically a federal policy that rubber stamps every last whim of terrible regional monopolies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. And rich benefactors like Elon Musk. Anybody consciously voting for this level of sleazy self-serving corruption shouldn’t be allowed to operate heavy machinery.
The changes are, ironically enough, likely to cause some major additional delays in people actually getting broadband as states are forced to retool their compliance strategies after years of planning. One organization, the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society, estimates that the changes could result in up to a two year additional delay in people getting broadband:
“Mandated changes—if they come from either Congress or the U.S. Department of Commerce—could force states to rerun their entire BEAD sub-grantee selection processes. The resulting delays will cost ISPs across the country hundreds of millions of dollars in time and resources to plan for the new program guidelines and reapply for awards.”
Again, very ironic that Republicans would spend much of the last year complaining about delays in this program, only to introduce massive new delays. And not delays that are actually beneficial to the public, but delays that mostly help their buddies at AT&T/Comcast/Verizon and Elon Musk.
Apparently under the belief he was helping matters, Ezra Klein recently jumped into the broadband debate to make the unoriginal observation that government should make big promises and deliver on them. But his analysis of broadband was simplistically puerile; most of it seemed based on Republican angst, and ignored the real progress made on affordable fiber via ARPA and other initiatives.
Klein also ignored that a major reason BEAD moved slowly was due to corruption and telecom lobbyists trying to weaken and change the bill to their direct benefit (softening speed definitions, weakening map coverage, preventing competitors from getting grants). Corruption is something Klein’s new book tends to downplay as a primary issue of concern, despite its starring role in U.S. dysfunction.
BEAD was never going to win any awards for government efficiency. The bill was passed in 2021, yet states were only just starting to finalize deployment plans. But again there were some good reasons for this; creating a vast coalition of federal and local governments tasked with completely remapping broadband access, then vetting applicants to ensure they could deliver — takes a little time.
The great irony is that most of these delays were the direct result of government not wanting to repeat mistakes in past broadband government subsidy programs. Such as the FCC’s Rural Deployment Opportunity Fund, which was a giant boondoggle under the first Trump administration because the government didn’t do its homework on broadband mapping, or grant applicant credibility.
BEAD’s slower cadence was a direct result of fighting corruption and trying (with mixed results) to do things the right way. It was on the cusp of delivering real-world affordable fiber when Republicans showed up to fix things. By, again, making the resulting, reconstituted program take longer and deliver less. Ingenious. We are truly living in the golden age of populist abundance.
Republican (and Ezra Klein’s) angst over the slow speed of the BEAD broadband grant managed to get the press all hot and bothered for months. I’d wager that this angst curiously won’t be repeated now that pointless new delays were introduced by Republicans to the direct benefit of Elon Musk.
