A federal judge ruled Thursday that DOGE's cancellation of over $100 million in National Endowment for the Humanities grants was unconstitutional. US District Judge Colleen McMahon's 143-page decision finds that DOGE used ChatGPT to flag grants containing DEI-related terms, then cut funding based on those flags alone.
The ruling, prompted by a 2025 lawsuit from humanities groups, states it 'could not be more obvious' that DOGE used the presence of protected characteristics as disqualifying criteria. That is not a cost-cutting process. That is an automated civil rights violation rubber-stamped by a chatbot.
The full 143-page decision is worth reading for how it reconstructs DOGE's actual workflow, not just the legal conclusion. The methodology details show how a large language model became the decision layer in a federal funding process, and what courts now have to say about that.
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