Last week we covered how the government successfully convinced Judge Colleen McMahon to order the plaintiffs in the DOGE/National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) lawsuit to “claw back” the viral deposition videos they had posted to YouTube — videos showing DOGE operatives Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh stumbling through questions about how they used ChatGPT to decide which humanities grants to kill, and struggling mightily to define “DEI” despite it apparently being the entire basis for their work.
The government’s argument was that the videos had led to harassment and death threats against Fox and Cavanaugh — the same two who had no problem obliterating hundreds of millions in already approved grants with a simplistic ChatGPT prompt, but apparently couldn’t handle the public seeing them struggle to explain themselves under oath. The government argued the videos needed to come down. The judge initially agreed and ordered the plaintiffs to pull them. As we noted at the time, archivists had already uploaded copies to the Internet Archive and distributed them as torrents, because that’s how the internet works.
The ruling is worth reading in full, because McMahon manages to be critical of both sides while ultimately landing firmly against the government’s attempt to suppress the videos. She spends a good chunk of the opinion scolding the plaintiffs for what she clearly views as a procedural end-run — they sent the full deposition videos to chambers on a thumb drive without ever filing them on the docket or seeking permission to do so, which she sees as a transparent attempt to manufacture a “judicial documents” argument that would give the videos a presumption of public access.
McMahon doesn’t buy it:
When deciding a motion for summary judgment, the Court wants only those portions of a deposition on which a movant actually relies, and does not want to be burdened with irrelevant testimony merely because counsel chose to, or found it more convenient to, submit it. And because videos cannot be filed on the public docket without leave of court, there was no need for the rule to contain a specific reference to video transcriptions; the only way to get such materials on the docket (and so before the Court) was to make a motion, giving the Court the opportunity to decide whether the videos should be publicly docketed. This Plaintiffs did not do.
But if Plaintiffs wanted to know whether the Court’s rule applied to video-recorded depositions, they could easily have sought clarification – just as they could easily have filed a motion seeking leave to have the Clerk of Court accept the videos and place them on the public record. Again, they did not. At the hearing held on March 17, 2026, on Defendants’ present motion for a protective order, counsel for ACLS Plaintiffs, Daniel Jacobson, acknowledged the reason, stating “Frankly, your Honor, part of it was just the amount of time that it would have taken” to submit only the portions of the videos on which Plaintiffs intended to rely. Hr’g Tr., 15:6–7. In other words, “It would have been too much work.” That is not an acceptable excuse.
The Court is left with the firm impression that at least “part of” the reason counsel did not ask for clarification was because they wished to manufacture a “judicial documents” argument and did not wish to be told they could not do so. The Court declines to indulge that tactic.
Fair enough. But having knocked the plaintiffs for their procedural maneuver, the judge then turns to the actual question: has the government shown “good cause” under Rule 26(c) to justify a protective order keeping the videos off the internet? And the answer is a pretty resounding no. And that’s because public officials acting in their official capacities have significantly diminished privacy interests in their official conduct:
The Government’s motion fails for three independent reasons. First, the materials at issue concern the conduct of public officials acting in their official capacities, which substantially diminishes any cognizable privacy interest and weighs against restriction. Second, the Government has not made the particularized showing of a “clearly defined, specific and serious injury” required by Rule 26(c). Third, the Government has not demonstrated that the prospective relief it seeks would be effective in preventing the harms it identifies, particularly where those harms arise from the conduct of third-party actors beyond the control of the parties.
She cites Garrison v. Louisiana (the case that extended the “actual malice” standard from NY Times v. Sullivan) for the proposition that the public’s interest “necessarily includes anything which might touch on an official’s fitness for office,” and that “[f]ew personal attributes are more germane to fitness for office than dishonesty, malfeasance, or improper motivation.” Given that these depositions are literally about how government officials decided to terminate hundreds of millions of dollars in grants, that framing fits.
The judge also directly calls out the government’s arguments about harassment and reputational harm, and essentially says: that’s the cost of being a public official whose official conduct is being scrutinized. Suck it up, DOGE bros.
Reputational injury, public criticism, and even harsh commentary are not unexpected consequences of disclosing information about public conduct. They are foreseeable incidents of public scrutiny concerning government action. Where, as here, the material sought to be shielded by a protective order is testimony about the actions of government officials acting in their official capacities, embarrassment and reputational harm arising from the public’s reaction to official conduct is not the sort of harm against which Rule 26(c) protects. Public officials “accept certain necessary consequences” of involvement in public affairs, including “closer public scrutiny than might otherwise be the case.”
As for the death threats and harassment — which McMahon explicitly says she takes seriously and calls “deeply troubling” and “highly inappropriate” — she notes that there are actual laws against threats and cyberstalking, and that Rule 26(c) protective orders aren’t a substitute for law enforcement doing its job:
There are laws against threats and harassment; the Government and its witnesses have every right to ask law enforcement to take action against those who engage in such conduct, by enforcing federal prohibitions on interstate threats and cyberstalking, see, e.g., 18 U.S.C. §§ 875(c), 2261A, as well as comparable state laws. Rule 26(c) is not a substitute for those remedies.
And then there’s the practical reality McMahon acknowledges directly: it’s too damn late. The videos have already spread everywhere. A protective order aimed solely at the plaintiffs would accomplish approximately nothing.
At bottom, the Government has not shown that the relief it seeks is capable of addressing the harm it identifies. The videos have already been widely disseminated across multiple platforms, including YouTube, X, TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit, where they have been shared, reposted, and viewed by at least hundreds of thousands of users, resulting in near-instantaneous and effectively permanent global distribution. This is a predictable consequence of dissemination in the modern digital environment, where content can be copied, redistributed, and indefinitely preserved beyond the control of any single actor. Given this reality, a protective order directed solely at Plaintiffs would not meaningfully limit further dissemination or mitigate the Government’s asserted harms.
Separately, the plaintiffs asked for attorney’s fees, and McMahon denied that too, noting that she wasn’t going to “reward Plaintiffs for bypassing its procedures” even though the government’s motion ultimately failed. So everyone gets a little bit scolded here. But the bottom line is clear: you don’t get to send unqualified DOGE kids to nuke hundreds of millions in grants using a ChatGPT prompt, and then ask a court to hide the video of them trying to explain themselves under oath.
Releasing full deposition videos is certainly not the norm, but given that these are government officials who were making massively consequential decisions with a chatbot and no discernible expertise, the world is much better off with this kind of transparency — even if Justin and Nate had to face some people on the internet making fun of them for 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.
Federal grants that had been approved after a full application and review process were terminated by some random inexperienced DOGE bros based on whether ChatGPT could explain—in under 120 characters—that they were “related to DEI.”
That’s what the newly released proposed amended complaint from the Authors Guild against the US government reveals about how DOGE actually decided which National Endowment for the Humanities grants to kill.
There were plenty of early reports that the DOGE bros Elon Musk brought into government—operating on the hubristically ignorant belief that they understood how things worked better than actual government employees—were using AI tools to figure out what to cut. Now we have the receipts.
Cavanaugh was appointed president of the U.S. Institute of Peace after DOGE took over, though that position is affected by this week’s court ruling. Shortly after being named the acting director of theInteragency Council on Homelessness— one of the agencies Trump’s budget proposal calls for eliminating — Cavanaugh placed its entire staff on administrative leave.
Cavanaugh first emerged atGSAin February, where he met with many technical staffers and software engineers and interviewed them about their jobs, according to four GSA employees who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation.
Since then, he’s also been detailed to multiple other agencies, according to court filings, including the U.S. African Development Foundation (USADF), the Inter-American Foundation (IAF), the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and theMinority Business Development Agency.
Cavanaugh’s partner in much of the small agency outreach is Justin Fox, who most recently worked as an associate at Nexus Capital Management, according to his LinkedIn profile.
As far as I can tell, Cavanaugh is a college dropout who founded a startup to do IP licensing management, that has gone through some trouble. We’ve mentioned Cavanaugh here before, for the time when he was head of the US Institute for Peace, and Elon and DOGE falsely labeled a guy who had worked for USIP a member of the Taliban, causing the actual Taliban to kidnap the guy’s family. Fox, as noted, was a low rung employee at some random private equity firm. Neither should have any of the jobs listed above, and don’t seem to know shit about anything relevant to a government role.
Anyway, as the Authors Guild figured out in discovery, when these two inexperienced and ignorant DOGE bros were assigned to cut grants in the National Endowment for the Humanities, apparently Fox just started feeding grant titles to ChatGPT asking (in effect) “is this DEI?” From the complaint:
To flag grants for their DEI involvement, Fox entered the following command into ChatGPT: “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.” He then inserted short descriptions of each grant. Fox did nothing to understand ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” as used in the command or to ensure that ChatGPT’s interpretation of “DEI” matched his own.
Cool.
Then, actual staff at the NEH, including experts who might have been able to explain to these two interlopers what the grants actually did and why they were worth supporting, were blocked from challenging the termination of these grants.
Grants identified this way were slated for termination—with only a handful of exceptions, staff at NEH, including the Acting Chair, were not permitted to remove them from the termination list.
It seems to me that two ignorant DOGE bros cancelling humanities grants based solely on “yo is this DEI?” ChatGPT prompts, kinda shows the need for actual diversity, equity, and inclusion in how things like the National Endowment for the Humanities should work. Instead, you have two rando dweebs who don’t understand shit asking the answer machine to justify cancelling grants that sound too woke.
It really feels like these two chucklefucks should be asked to justify their jobs way more than any of these grant recipients should have to justify their work. But, nope, the bros just got to cancelling.
See if you notice a pattern.
For instance, Fox searched each grant’s description for the use of key words that appeared in a “Detection List” that he created. Those key words included terms such as “LGBTQ,” “homosexual,” “tribal,” “immigrants,” “gay,” “BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color),” “native,” and so on. Terms like “white,” “Caucasian,” and “heterosexual” did not appear in the Detection List.
Fox also organized certain grants into a spreadsheet with lists that he labeled “Craziest Grants” and “Other Bad Grants.” Among the grants on those lists were those Fox described as relating to “experiences of LGBTQ military service,” “oral histories of LatinX in the mid-west,” “social and cultural context of tribal linguistics,” and a “book on the ‘first gay black science fiction writer in history.’”
Fox also used the Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) tool ChatGPT to search grant descriptions that purportedly related to DEI, but Fox did not direct the AI tool that it should not identify grants solely on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or similar characteristic. The AI searches broadly captured all grants that referred to individuals based on precisely those characteristics. For example, the AI searches flagged a grant described as concerning “the Colfax massacre, the single greatest incidence of anti-Black violence during Reconstruction,” another concerning “the untold story of Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust,” another that funded a film examining how the game of baseball was “instrumental in healing wounds caused by World War I and the 1980s economic standoff between the US and Japan,” another charting “the rise and reforms of the Native Americans boarding school systems in the U.S. between 1819 and 1934,” and another about “the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), the first female pilots to fly for the U.S. military during WWII” and the “Black female pilots who . . . were denied entry into the WASP because of their race.”
So, yeah. This kid basically fed any grant that might upset a white Christian nationalist into ChatGPT, saying “justify me cancelling this shit for being woke” and then he and his college dropout “IP licensing” buddy cancelled them all.
Cavanaugh worked closely with Fox in selecting which grants to terminate using this selection criteria.
Fox and Cavanaugh sorted grants in lists labeled “to cancel” or “to keep.”
No grant relating to DEI as broadly conceived of by Fox and Cavanaugh appeared on the “to keep” list. Grants that Fox and Cavanaugh considered “wasteful” and thus slated for termination could be moved to the “to keep” list by Defendant McDonald only if they related to “America 250” or the “Garden of Heroes” initiatives based on the views of Defendants McDonald, Fox, Cavanaugh, and NEH staff member, Adam Wolfson
The complaint notes that almost immediately Cavanaugh and Fox sent out mass emails to more than 1,400 grant recipients, from a private non-government email server, telling them their grants had been terminated.
Even though the emails stated that the grant terminations were “signed” by the acting director of NEH, Michael McDonald, he admitted he had nothing to do with them. It was all Fox, Cavanaugh… and ChatGPT based on a very stupid prompt.
McDonald appeared to acknowledge that he did not determine which grants to terminate nor did he draft the termination letters. First, he stated that he had explained NEH’s traditional termination process but that “as they said in the notification letter…they would not be adhering to traditional notification processes” and “they did not feel those should be applied in this instance.” Further, in response to a question about the rationale for grant terminations, he replied that the “rationale was simply because that’s the way DOGE had operated at other agencies and they applied the same methodology here.” McDonald also said that any statement about the number of grants terminated would be “conjecture” on his part, even though he purportedly signed each termination letter
DOGE bros gone wild.
So, just to recap, we have two random DOGE bros with basically no knowledge or experience in the humanities (and at least one of whom is a college dropout), who just went around terminating grants that had gone through a full grant application process by feeding in a list of culture war grievance terms, selecting out the grant titles based on the appearance of seemingly “woke” words, then asking ChatGPT “yo, tell me this is DEI” and then sending termination emails the next day from a private server and forging the director’s signature.
This is what “government efficiency” looks like in practice: two guys with zero relevant experience, a keyword list built on culture war grievances, and a chatbot confidently spitting out 120-character verdicts on federal grants that went through actual review processes. The experts who might have explained what these grants actually do? Locked out. The director whose signature appeared on termination letters? Couldn’t tell you which grants got cut or why.
The cruelty isn’t incidental. But neither is the incompetence. These are people who genuinely believe that being good at vibes-based pattern matching is the same as understanding how institutions work. And the wreckage they leave behind is the entirely predictable result.
It was early morning on April 1 when Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar, got a panicked message from his son. Halimi’s name had just appeared in a viral post on X, shared by none other than the site’s owner and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
Halimi thought his son was joking. It was April Fools’ Day after all. Musk had been assigned a big job in the Trump administration, running the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency that was established to comb through the government to root out waste and fraud.
Halimi had a much smaller job, working on a contract for the United States Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit funded by Congress that promotes conflict resolution efforts around the world, including in Halimi’s native Afghanistan. There was no way, he thought to himself, that someone like him would have landed on Musk’s radar.
But Halimi’s son was not joking. He told Halimi to go online and see for himself. The post, which Musk shared with his 222 million followers, was real. It had already been picked up by the local press back home. And it was potentially deadly.
“United States Institute of Peace Funded Taliban,” the post read. At the bottom, the post named Halimi and described him as a “former Taliban member,” and the payments to him as U.S. support for the militants. Below that, thousands of comments tumbled in, calling him a terrorist and a grifter. Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia later chimed in to congratulate Musk for discovering that “the federal government is paying the Taliban and they covered it up.”
Halimi couldn’t make any sense of it. Critics of U.S. foreign aid efforts might argue that his small contract of $132,000 with USIP amounted to waste. But if there was one thing Washington should have known about Halimi, it was that he was no enemy of America.
It was true that he’d once worked for the Taliban government that ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, but he had switched sides after the United States invaded following 9/11. He had even served as a cabinet minister in the U.S.-backed Afghan government, where he often shared his knowledge of the Taliban’s internal workings with intelligence officials and military leaders.
In fact, during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, Halimi was part of a team of advisers that helped the U.S. prepare for difficult diplomatic talks with the Taliban, which eventually included guarantees to allow American troops safe passage out.
And his political views were easy to figure out: Halimi had made numerous media appearances as one of the Taliban’s more ardent critics, accusing them of straying from Islam’s true principles.
This all made him an obvious target. The Taliban had attempted to assassinate Halimi as a traitor at least three times during the U.S. occupation. And the U.S. government knew he had faced real danger in the past. He narrowly managed to flee Afghanistan in the final days before the U.S.-backed government fell to the Taliban, with the help of the second-highest-ranking CIA officer in the country. Since then, he had tried to live a mostly quiet life, partly to keep the relatives he’d left behind safe from retribution.
The work he was pursuing with USIP had nothing to do with supporting the Taliban. It was the opposite.
ProPublica has obtained records making clear that Musk and his team at the newly formed DOGE should have known this too. Halimi’s work at USIP was spelled out in precise detail in the agency’s records, down to the tasks he performed on specific days. His role at the institute was far from top secret, but it had been treated as highly sensitive and confidential. Among other tasks, it involved a program gathering information on the ground about living conditions for Afghan women, who are largely barred from education past primary school or from having a role in public life.
Partly because of Halimi’s contentious history with the Taliban, the militants might equate his work at USIP to espionage and severely punish anyone involved with it. By exposing him, Musk and his team endangered those working with Halimi, as well his relatives who were still in Afghanistan. The White House and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Multiple senior government officials at the State Department were warned about the danger that DOGE’s callout posed to Halimi’s family, according to two USIP staffers interviewed by ProPublica. They were trying to stop the damage from spreading. But Musk’s crew was then locked in a pitched battle for control of USIP. The misleading narrative about Halimi became central to DOGE’s argument; American foreign aid was corrupt and even, at times, funding America’s enemies — and that’s why DOGE had to take over.
Those battles were playing out across the government at the time. DOGE often won, but ultimately Musk’s tenure was short-lived. He resigned from DOGE at the end of May, shortly before a public falling-out with Trump. DOGE’s hard-charging takeovers of government agencies brought chaos and confusion and left many qualified bureaucrats jobless. But Halimi risked losing a lot more.
Shortly after Halimi spoke to his son, a flood of threatening messages began appearing on his phone. The most ominous came from members of the Taliban. Just as Halimi had worried, they accused him of being a thief and traitor, which could be like a death sentence for anyone connected to him back home. “My family was in great danger,” Halimi thought to himself.
About a week after DOGE outed him, Halimi’s worst fears were realized. Taliban intelligence agents in Kabul descended on the homes of his relatives and detained three of his family members. They were blindfolded, thrown into the backs of 4×4 pickup trucks and driven to a small remote prison. They were held incommunicado over several days and repeatedly beaten and questioned about Halimi and his recently publicized yet ambiguous work for the United States.
The account of the beatings is based on interviews with multiple people familiar with the events. ProPublica did not interview any sources in Afghanistan, a country where people are sometimes imprisoned for speaking out against the government.
Zabihullah Mujahid, chief government spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, said Halimi “is not important to us and we do not want to talk about him that much.” He added that there was no active criminal investigation targeting him. The spokesperson did not answer questions about the treatment of Halimi’s family, saying, “I do not consider it necessary to answer.”
While Halimi felt powerless to do anything, his relatives in Afghanistan braced themselves for even worse. He tried to put on a brave face, though he knew from his own near-death experiences with the Taliban that the situation was increasingly bleak.
“To keep the morale of the family high, I did not show them my panic,” he told ProPublica in one of multiple interviews conducted through a translator.
He’d been frantically reaching out to his bosses in Washington to ask what was behind Musk’s social media blasts against him and to seek help clearing his name. But everyone Halimi worked with had been fired.
A 28-year-old college dropout named Nate Cavanaugh had been installed as USIP’s new president. DOGE had ousted its leader, State Department veteran George E. Moose.
Halimi and his loved ones were on their own. Maybe, they hoped, this would all pass if they stayed quiet and lay low. Then Musk and DOGE took their campaign against USIP and Halimi to another level.
In May, a little more than a month later, DOGE invited Fox News host Jesse Watters to sit in and film one of its team meetings. It was the first major media appearance by the larger DOGE team. For nearly 30 minutes on prime-time TV, Musk and more than a dozen triumphant young men in suits sat around a table congratulating one another. They swapped war stories about the government fraud they had exposed and the wasteful bureaucrats they had brought to heel.
At that point, DOGE was riding high: It had mostly shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main foreign aid agency. The watchdog Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been reduced to a skeleton crew. And at the Department of Education, DOGE had cut hundreds of millions of dollars to an internal research arm that tracks the performance of public schools.
For weeks, DOGE had been posting online hundreds of contracts it had canceled and tallying up the savings — though in multiple cases, the totals were later found to be wildly off, or the contracts mostly misrepresented. The White House has defended the accuracy of DOGE’s claims, with a spokesperson recently saying, “All numbers are rigorously scrubbed with agency procurement officials.”
With Watters, the DOGE team zeroed in on government spending. Steve Davis, Musk’s right-hand man at DOGE, shared an eye-popping example of waste from the Education Department. He said that the department had misused taxpayer money by funding parties at Caesars Palace, a casino and hotel in Las Vegas, before DOGE implemented new requirements to submit receipts. The claim appeared to have little resemblance to the truth: One school district in Utah had used DOE funds to send teachers to an education conference hosted at a Caesars hotel. Davis did not reply to a request for comment.
Musk went around the table, prodding the other members of the team as they one-upped one another with outrageous examples of their own. With each story, Watters egged them on, raising his eyebrows in disbelief. Every so often, the DOGE team would burst into laughter.
“The Taliban Gets DOGED”
At one point, Musk cued Cavanaugh with an awkward joke about how the work he’d found being done at the United States Institute of Peace was actually “the opposite of the title.”
Cavanaugh agreed, saying, “It was by far the least peaceful agency we worked with.” To prove his point, he turned toward Watters and said he’d uncovered documents showing that the agency was making payments to a contractor associated with the Taliban.
Watters looked at Cavanaugh in disbelief: “Get out of here.”
“This is real,” Cavanaugh said. Watters raised a hand, pressing on: “What was the money going to the Taliban for? … Was it for opium, or weapons, or a bribe?”
“Or nothing,” Musk interjected.
He and Watters burst into laughter. The chyron at the bottom of the screen read, “THE TALIBAN GETS DOGED.”
In a statement, a spokesperson with Fox News said, “It’s clear ProPublica is trying to insert FOX News into this story despite acknowledging the network having no part in any unmasking or identification of the independent contractor.” The spokesperson added, “At no point was the contractor identified, and the focus of the interview was on extreme spending practices and potential billing fraud within government agencies.”
In an email, Cavanaugh said he was mandated by Trump to dismantle the USIP, and “that includes the contract with former Taliban member Mohammad Qasem Halimi.” Cavanaugh added, “An overwhelming majority of Americans would agree that the Federal Government should not be funding former members of the Taliban when our country is $36T in debt.” He did not respond to questions about why DOGE chose to publicize Halimi’s contract or whether it knew the risk in doing so.
While DOGE initially referred to Halimi as a “former Taliban member,” the distinction was sometimes lost as Halimi’s contract became a viral social media and news story. For example, one social media post claiming that USIP had been “funding multiple terrorist organizations” was viewed by more than 180,000 people. And on Fox News, Cavanaugh dropped the reference that Halimi was a “former” Taliban member, describing his USIP work simply as payments to the Taliban.
Cavanaugh told Watters that DOGE was unable to find any justification for those payments. But ProPublica’s reporting showed that four weeks earlier, Cavanaugh had been sent dozens of pages of internal records from USIP outlining Halimi’s work in detail, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. There were invoices, project descriptions, and dates and times showing what Halimi was supposed to be doing on specific days. Cavanaugh did not respond to questions about his access to these records or how they appeared to conflict with his statements on Fox News.
Timeline of Events
Mar. 17: DOGE staffers, standing alongside local law enforcement officers, work their way into the USIP headquarters in downtown Washington.
Mar. 313:58pm EST: DOGE sends Halimi an email notifying him that his contract with USIP has been terminated.
Mar. 317:17pm EST: In a post on X, DOGE exposes Halimi’s work with the USIP, worth $132,000, and calls him a former Taliban member.
Mar. 31 to Apr. 17:29 p.m. ESTto 2:41 p.m. EST: Two USIP holdover employees — who supported Musk’s initiative and, as IT staffers, had wide access to USIP systems — sent Cavanaugh and his DOGE team a series of emails with documents about Halimi’s employment, including receipts and a scope of work, making it clear his duties were well documented.
Apr. 17:46 a.m. EST: DOGE’s post about Halimi’s USIP contract is picked up by local press in Afghanistan, where the Taliban notice the development.
Around Apr. 9: Members of Halimi’s family are picked up by Taliban security forces around Kabul, taken to prison and beaten.
May 1: Cavanaugh, Musk and other DOGE staffers meet with Jesse Watters on Fox News, where they describe the payments to Halimi as a rogue contract with a Taliban member. Watters asks whether taxpayer money was really being used to run drugs and guns inside Afghanistan — allegations that are untrue.
USIP’s own records, obtained by ProPublica, show that none of the institute’s work involved payments to the Taliban. Much of what Halimi did was actually routine foreign policy consulting: He provided expert advice to the State Department to help U.S. diplomats understand religious dynamics and civil society in Afghanistan. He was paid to attend Islamic conferences, where he made contact with other prominent political and religious figures across the Middle East on behalf of the USIP.
He was also an adviser to USIP on women’s issues in Islam, something he was uniquely qualified to do both personally and professionally. Years earlier, Halimi’s sister had been murdered by her husband in an act of domestic violence, and Halimi spoke about her openly and emotionally, recalled Mary Akrami, an Afghan women’s rights advocate who opened the country’s first women’s shelter after the Taliban fell.
As an official in the government of Hamid Karzai, Halimi was an outspoken advocate for the shelter. “He was one of the most supportive and open-minded religious scholars I have ever known,” Akrami said in an interview.
Halimi went on to serve in a number of high-profile posts in the U.S.-backed government, including as an investigator at the Supreme Court, a spokesperson for the national religious council, an adviser to the national security council, and finally the minister for religious affairs and hajj under the last democratically elected president, Ashraf Ghani.
After the Fox News interview, Halimi was struggling to move forward. By early spring, the Taliban had released his beaten and terrified family members. But they made it clear that they expected Halimi to publicly admit that he was an American spy. There were no good options. Such an admission would mean that his family would never be safe again, since they’d forever be associated with a traitor. But if he refused, they would also be under constant pressure.
Halimi had barely escaped the country four years earlier, when the U.S.-backed government he worked for collapsed in the face of a rapid Taliban military advance into the capital. A prominent Taliban cleric had publicly singled him out as an apostate — a traitor to Islam — placing a bullseye on his head. And Halimi said that a broad amnesty offer from the Taliban, extended to most of their enemies, would not apply to him. (The Taliban spokesperson told ProPublica that Halimi was free to return to Afghanistan.)
The situation was dire, and the U.S. government knew it too. In those final days, a CIA operative reached out to Halimi and directed him to catch an evacuation flight. Disguised as an ambulance driver and with his nephew donning a nurse outfit, Halimi evaded multiple Taliban checkpoints en route to the U.S.-controlled airbase at Bagram. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment. The Pentagon declined to comment and referred questions about Halimi’s past work with the U.S. to the State Department.
“I never cried harder in my life than I did that night when I left my country,” he told ProPublica. “But I had no choice.”
It wasn’t Halimi’s first time in exile.
When he was 7 years old, his mother took him and his six siblings across the border to Pakistan to escape the civil war that engulfed Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. “My earliest recollections are just of war, of violence, of blood and of killings,” Halimi said. “My mother used to tell me Afghanistan was a peaceful place in the past. I have no memory of it.”
Halimi’s father, the town imam in a rural Afghan village, had died when Halimi was young. He and his siblings grew up in a tent across the border within a refugee camp. From a dirt-floored classroom, Halimi found a way out through a scholarship to study Islamic law in Egypt.
Halimi’s time in Cairo, where he socialized with international students from across the globe, changed him. He began looking at the world differently, he said, with a curiosity about other cultures and a lifelong interest in foreign languages.
But by the time he returned home, a group of conservative religious students turned rebel fighters were dominating Afghanistan’s messy, multisided civil war and had consolidated power over the capital. They were known as the Taliban.
Halimi took a job in a government office responsible for dealing with foreign diplomats, not because he believed in Taliban ideology, but because, for a man with a college degree and political aspirations, “it was the only good job I could find,” he said.
Then came the U.S. invasion, which ousted the Taliban government and ushered in a bloody, protracted war. The George W. Bush administration ordered the detention of swaths of the Taliban government at a giant prison at Bagram Airfield. Halimi was among them. The treatment was brutal. He was constantly shackled by his hands and feet, except for short bathroom breaks. But along the way, he said, he learned English and built an understanding of his captors.
While some prominent Taliban fighters and leaders were sent to Guantanamo, Halimi, as a relatively unknown bureaucrat, was part of a group that was gradually let out. Some people were enlisted to join the U.S.-backed government; their experience made them useful to Washington and its local allies’ efforts to understand, and even communicate with, the Taliban.
In those early days of the conflict, the U.S. military and intelligence communities were under tremendous pressure to stop further attacks on the homeland. Yet they knew virtually nothing about their assumed enemy. What followed was two decades of American military intervention across the region that led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the resurgence of the very groups the U.S. once sought to unseat.
When U.S. forces finally withdrew for good from Afghanistan in late 2021, so did Halimi. His country had been savaged by warring powers for decades. Somehow, he had managed to stay alive through all of it, but now there was no place for him.
Nate Cavanaugh had nothing in his background to suggest he would be chosen to wind down an international conflict-resolution agency. His 15 minutes of fame on Fox News represented an unlikely turn for a young man who’d spent his short career founding niche tech startups.
Cavanaugh comes from a wealthy family — his father built a $100 million sports supplement company — and he told people he was inspired by the tech mogul Peter Thiel. He started two small companies, which focused on specialized software tools to help companies manage their finances and intellectual property. But investors in both told ProPublica that neither company successfully took off.
When DOGE was announced, Cavanaugh was eager to join up, a former co-worker told ProPublica. It’s not clear how he ultimately got connected to the group, but DOGE recruited heavily from young right-wing tech circles in California.
Friends and former colleagues said they’d never heard him discuss American foreign policy or show an interest in geopolitics. Yet in January, as a leader in Musk’s DOGE, he was assigned to evaluate and oversee budget cuts across a variety of federally funded international programs. Among the agencies in Cavanaugh’s portfolio were the Inter-American Foundation and African Development Foundation. He was part of the DOGE team that sought cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities and redirected its funds to build a park full of statues of “American Heroes,” according to a lawsuit by NEH grant recipients.
But it was the U.S. Institute of Peace, housed in a futuristic, glass-encased building overlooking the Potomac River in downtown Washington, where Cavanaugh hit resistance. Established under President Ronald Reagan, the agency had once enjoyed bipartisan support. While it’s largely taxpayer funded, USIP is not a government agency; its contracts have not typically been posted publicly, and its employees operate with a degree of removal from U.S. officialdom. That gives the institute some ability to operate behind the scenes and establish relationships with figures at the center of complex conflicts — figures such as Mohammad Halimi.
It’s often pushing informal diplomacy: In 2023, for example, USIP staff helped facilitate a ceasefire between Islamic rebels and the government of the Philippines in the country’s restive south.
But in 2024, the Heritage Foundation — which led Project 2025 — published a report arguing that USIP had become a partisan, Democrat-controlled institution.
When Cavanaugh and several other DOGE officials first showed up to take control of the USIP in March, he was physically blocked from entering the building by its security chief, Colin O’Brien, who spent 15 years working as a police officer before joining the institute. Cavanaugh tried to enter again a little later, this time with two FBI agents in tow. O’Brien blocked him again, believing Cavanaugh and DOGE had no business dismantling the USIP, which had been established by Congress as an independent entity.
Over the next few days, DOGE put more pressure on O’Brien. FBI agents indicated O’Brien was the subject of a new Justice Department investigation. And they visited the home of one of his subordinates for questioning. Ultimately, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington at the time, Trump ally Edward Martin, demanded that USIP officials give DOGE access to the building.
The next time Cavanaugh appeared at the agency’s door, he and a phalanx of local police officers forced their way in. “I am a firm believer that what makes this country special is that we follow laws and process,” O’Brien said. “What happened that day was the antithesis of everything I believe in.”
An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the role of FBI personnel in the takeover. Martin did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police Department of D.C. referred ProPublica to a published statement, which said that police officers spoke with the new acting USIP president and assisted him in removing “unauthorized individuals” from the building.
Once in possession of its offices and information systems, Cavanaugh and his team fired virtually all USIP personnel, including over 100 overseas staff. With little warning or awareness of the potential danger to overseas employees, former staffers said, they shuttered USIP offices in Pakistan, Nigeria and El Salvador. After DOGE fired USIP’s international security team, its staff in Libya feared for their safety and were forced to flee on their own across the border. Cavanaugh and his staff canceled more than 700 contracts over 12 days.
They rifled through other USIP files, spotlighting expenditures they used to publicly embarrass the institute. On Fox, DOGE also bragged about uncovering payments for “private jets,” when, in fact, records show that USIP chartered a single plane for an evacuation mission out of a war zone for its staff. Cavanaugh did not answer a question about the assertion.
Over the following weeks, the DOGE team celebrated its newfound power inside the USIP building. Members were seen smoking cigars in the office and drinking beer as they worked late into the night. The agency’s insignia was torn from the entryway.
“DOGE was completely indifferent to the effect their actions had on human beings,” said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert who has served as a senior adviser for the United Nations and State Department. All it cared about, he said, was making “its enemies look bad.”
Months after Musk’s fateful retweet, Halimi is still picking up the pieces and trying to get answers.
During his long career as an official in the Afghan government, Halimi often rubbed shoulders with senior U.S. diplomats and generals, but now no one in the Trump administration is calling him back. He proudly showed ProPublica a letter he received from Stephen Hadley, the former U.S. national security adviser under George W. Bush, thanking him for his contributions to “promoting democracy” in Afghanistan.
A letter on White House letterhead sent to Halimi in 2005 from Stephen Hadley, assistant to the president for national security affairs, thanking him for his work Credit:Obtained by ProPublica
Former senior State Department, White House and national security officials who worked on Afghanistan over the last two decades described the Trump administration’s attack on Halimi as not only absurd, but also dangerous.
Johnny Walsh, a former State Department official who worked with Halimi, recalled that “he wanted the same thing as the Trump administration,” which was for a peaceful end to the war.
Lisa Curtis, a former senior adviser to the National Security Council who focused on Afghanistan in the first Trump administration, said, “DOGE did not do their homework. They are putting at risk individuals who are helping the United States.”
As for the graying Afghan scholar, the Taliban relented just long enough for several family members to make it out of the country. ProPublica is not disclosing how that happened or where they are for their safety, but they remain stranded without immigration status.
Cavanaugh, DOGE’s man inside USIP, announced he was leaving government service on Aug. 6. In a tweet, Cavanaugh thanked Trump “for the opportunity to help reduce wasteful spending” and said that “I’m hopeful the United States continues to prioritize sensible spending — I believe it is critical to maintain our supremacy 🇺🇸.”
USIP’s operations have been essentially frozen. Its headquarters is under federal control — standing empty aside from a few security guards monitoring the entrances. A new acting president, Darren Beattie, was named in late July.
Beattie is a former Duke University professor and Trump speechwriter who was fired in 2018 after it came out that he spoke at a conference regularly attended by white nationalists. Beattie did not address a ProPublica question about the event but previously dismissed the criticism, calling it “an honor to be attacked by the far-left.”
At USIP, he has promised to rebuild the organization to match the Trump administration’s foreign policy priorities.
In an emailed statement to ProPublica, Beattie defended the administration’s treatment of Halimi. The takeover of USIP, he wrote, “underscores President Trump’s resolve to end the weaponization of government, cut off funding to adversaries, and shut down reckless so-called peacebuilding programs that end up undermining our national security.”
George Foote, the former head lawyer of USIP who still represents its old leadership in ongoing litigation against the Trump administration, called DOGE’s outing of Halimi “criminally careless.”
Halimi remains without work. He wonders how he will support his wife and children and whether there’s any chance he can clear his name. At the very least, he hopes that the Trump administration will admit the error that has caused his family so much harm.
In one of ProPublica’s final interviews, Halimi made a last request: Could we help him get an audience with Musk?
“Why would one of the richest men in the world commit such an act of injustice?” Halimi asked. “Sometimes I think that if Elon Musk himself were fully informed about this matter, he would likely be deeply ashamed.”
