DOGE staffer who flagged grants for ‘DEI’ struggles to define what it is during questioning

A staff member for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, who was in charge of flagging grants for “DEI,” struggled to define the term during a lawsuit deposition. Justin Fox was assigned to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and described his role as highlighting any projects that would be disqualified for federal funding because they promoted “diversity, equity and inclusion,” as defined by Donald Trump’s executive order of January 2025. Fox, when questioned as part of a lawsuit filed by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American History Association, and the Modern Language Association, seemed unable or reluctant to define the term himself, instead pivoting to how it was characterized in Trump’s EO. A tranche of documents from the lawsuit has revealed that inexperienced DOGE staff used ChatGPT to shred the NEH in just 22 days, canceling 97 per cent of grants.