When DOGE Unleashed ChatGPT on the Humanities

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/arts/humanities-endowment-doge-trump.html

No paywall link
https://archive.li/9kCcq

When the Trump administration went looking last spring for National Endowment for the Humanities grants to cut, it turned to a familiar scourge of professors: ChatGPT.

Last March, two employees from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency arrived at the agency with the mandate of canceling previously approved grants that ran afoul of President Trump’s agenda. But instead of looking closely at funded projects, they pulled short summaries off the internet and fed them into the A.I. chatbot.

The prompt was simple: “Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’” The results were sweeping, and sometimes bizarre.

Building improvements at an Indigenous languages archive in Alaska risked “promoting inclusion and diverse perspectives.” Renewal of a longstanding grant to digitize Black newspapers and add them to a historical database was “D.E.I.” So was work on a 40-volume scholarly series on the history of American music.

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.”

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