DOGE lead says inexperienced team didn’t need ‘scholarly background’ to deny millions in DEI grants

One of the DOGE staffers leading Elon Musk’s DEI purge of US government departments says he believes it was appropriate for inexperienced twenty-somethings to be cancelling millions in government grants. Nathan Cavanaugh was part of a young team brought in to examine the National Endowment for the Humanities for requests which contravened Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order banning anything considered to promote diversity, equity or inclusion. Cavanaugh, in a deposition filmed as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Council of Learned Societies and others, said he did not think it was inappropriate that people with no experience in peer review or government work were making decisions which end with 97% of grants being cancelled.