On his very first day in office in January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Conceived during a social media discussion and ostensibly modeled on past presidential advisory panels, DOGE was entrusted to billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk with a sweeping mandate to dismantle bureaucracy, slash excessive regulations, and cut trillions in wasteful federal spending. However, rather than operating as a traditional advisory board, DOGE rapidly mutated into a shadowy, unprecedented vehicle for executive overreach and oligarchic control over the American administrative state.
The true nature of this operation was recently laid bare by the “DOGE Tapes”—a trove of 23 hours of video depositions that a group of historians, archivists, and librarians uploaded to YouTube before a federal judge ordered their removal. These plaintiffs sued the administration after DOGE operatives effectively seized control of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), a small federal agency with a roughly $27 million annual budget, and unlawfully canceled more than $100 million in congressionally approved humanities grants.
The historical context of this takeover is vital. For decades, the American administrative state relied on specialized, politically neutral civil servants to execute complex statutory duties. As detailed in previous essays, the modern conservative movement, spearheaded by organizations like the Heritage Foundation, sought to dismantle this system by stripping civil service protections and installing political loyalists to aggressively enforce an ideological agenda. The DOGE Tapes reveal the frightening culmination of this project: the replacement of subject-matter experts with unaccountable tech billionaires utilizing artificial intelligence to unilaterally enforce a partisan culture war.
According to the deposition tapes, the DOGE small agencies team was led by Nate Kavanaugh, a 20-something whose background was in finance, not humanities or grant-making. In March 2025, Kavanaugh’s team met with Michael McDonald, the acting chair of the NEH who had been installed after the Biden-appointed chair was ousted. McDonald inexplicably allowed the DOGE “consultants” to take over the agency’s data to eliminate grants and cancel ongoing contracts.
What DOGE did with that data was a masterclass in arbitrary and capricious governance. Discovery in the lawsuit revealed that DOGE staffer Justin Fox bypassed standard grant management procedures and fed the NEH’s entire grant database into ChatGPT-4.5. Fox gave the AI a highly simplistic prompt: “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”. Furthermore, Fox employed a blunt keyword “detection list” that flagged grants containing terms like “bypoc,” “indigenous,” “tribal,” “homosexual,” “lgbtq,” “melting pot,” and “equality”.
Because the operatives never actually defined the legal or practical meaning of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI), the AI flagged absurd and deeply important projects for termination. Among the casualties were projects to preserve endangered Native American languages, an archival effort on the lives of Italian-Americans, and My Underground Mother, a documentary exploring the lives of Jewish women subjected to slave labor during the Holocaust. In a stunning display of algorithmic incompetence, ChatGPT even flagged a $349,000 grant for an HVAC system replacement at the High Point Museum in North Carolina as “DEI,” reasoning that improving air conditioning “enhances preservation conditions for collections aligning with the goal of providing greater access to diverse audiences”.
The tapes also exposed the profound illegality and structural chaos underlying DOGE itself. The purported acting administrator of DOGE, Amy Gleason, apparently only learned she was leading the organization while on vacation in Mexico, and key DOGE operatives testified they had virtually no interaction with her. Instead, the operation was functionally run by Steve Davis, one of Elon Musk’s top lieutenants. To shield their activities from public accountability and hide the tension growing between Musk and the White House, DOGE staffers coordinated the mass grant terminations using the encrypted, auto-deleting messaging app Signal—a flagrant violation of the Federal Records Act.
The plaintiffs have weaponized these revelations to mount a formidable legal challenge. Under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), agency decisions cannot be “arbitrary and capricious”—meaning there must be a rational connection between the facts and the outcome. Relying on undefined political buzzwords, AI keyword searches, and unaccountable outside actors to terminate binding government contracts is the very definition of an unlawful, irrational process.
More profoundly, the plaintiffs argue that these terminations violate the First Amendment. Supreme Court precedent dictates that while the government has discretion in what new projects it funds, it cannot engage in viewpoint discrimination by pulling the plug on existing, approved grants simply because it disagrees with the message the speakers are conveying.
The DOGE Tapes illustrate the ultimate, catastrophic failure of the modern conservative legal project. By equating government efficiency with the unilateral destruction of congressionally appropriated programs, the administration has bypassed the legislative branch entirely. In handing the levers of power to unaccountable tech oligarchs who use algorithms to blindly erase history, art, and science, the executive branch has subverted both the rule of law and the fundamental constitutional safeguards of American democracy.