DOGE slammed by judge for AI use in cutting $100 million

Zoe Tillman, Bloomberg News on May 7, 2026

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WASHINGTON — A U.S. judge blasted the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency project for relying on artificial intelligence tools as it orchestrated roughly $100 million in cuts to federal funding for humanities programs last year.

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon released a 143-page opinion on Thursday blocking the National Endowment for the Humanities from carrying out DOGE’s grant terminations. The New York-based judge found that the government’s actions were unconstitutional and that DOGE officials didn’t have authority to direct them.

McMahon slammed DOGE for how it had used the AI platform ChatGPT as part of its process for deciding which grants to cut. She wrote that the prompts inputted into the platform to review project descriptions were ill-defined, lacked context and ended up unconstitutionally focusing on race and other protected characteristics.

“DOGE’s use of race was certainly not remedial,” the judge wrote. “It was punitive.”

“The government’s asserted interests for terminating grants – administrative convenience, merit, and waste reduction – do not justify making race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, or sexual orientation the determinative grounds for terminating previously awarded grants,” McMahon continued.

The judge held that the administration ultimately was responsible for ChatGPT’s output and how it factored into the grant decisions. There was “not a scintilla of evidence” that DOGE employees “undertook any meaningful review” of whether the rationale provided by ChatGPT “made sense,” she found.

“One cannot treat ChatGPT and the government as distinct actors for constitutional purposes,” she wrote. “Any argument to the contrary is unworthy of representatives of the Department of Justice.”

The judge continued later in the ruling: “The government cannot escape liability for DOGE’s work by scapegoating ChatGPT.”

Spokespeople for the White House and the National Endowment for the Humanities did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Joy Connolly, president of the American Council of Learned Societies, one of the organizations that sued, said in a statement that the organization “will continue to press for the full restoration of NEH’s staff, programs, and capacity to serve the public it was created to support.”

“The humanities are not a luxury,” Connolly said. “They are how a democracy understands itself. Today’s decision is a step toward honoring the will of Congress and our mission as a nation — to seek the truth, know ourselves, and build a better future on that knowledge.”

The cuts were part of the administration’s broader effort to carry out President Donald Trump’s orders to end federal government support for programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion principles, or DEI, as well as “gender ideology” and “environmental justice.”

As part of the litigation, a former DOGE employee testified about how he had used the AI platform ChatGPT to identify DEI-related grants at the humanities agency. The employee said that he didn’t define “DEI” when he entered the prompts and didn’t know the platform’s understanding of the term. The platform’s results were then incorporated in a spreadsheet with recommendations from the agency’s staff.

According to McMahon’s opinion, more than 1,400 grant awards were terminated.

The cases are American Council of Learned Societies v. National Endowment for the Humanities, 25-cv-3657, and The Authors Guild v. National Endowment for the Humanities, 25-cv-3923, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

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