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(NEW YORK) — One year after Elon Musk began an unprecedented attempt to eliminate swaths of the federal government, newly released deposition videos are providing a never-before-seen look at two of the people responsible for the largest mass termination of federal grants in the National Endowment for the Humanities’ history.

According to the depositions and other materials released as part of a civil lawsuit related to the funding cuts, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) relied on ChatGPT to identify more than $100 million in grants related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that were later cancelled.

When President Donald Trump returned to office last January, he empowered Musk to slash federal spending as a lead adviser in the newly created DOGE. Within days, all agencies were directed to put DEI staff on leave and related programs were shuttered.

In lengthy depositions, two DOGE employees — Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh — defended the effort to cut “useless agencies” as part of DOGE’s attempt to reduce the federal deficit.

“You don’t regret that people might have lost important income … to support their lives?” an attorney asked Cavanaugh about the grant cancellations.

“No. I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from $2 trillion to close to zero,” Cavanaugh said.

“Did you reduce the federal deficit?” the attorney asked.

“No, we didn’t,” Cavanaugh said.

With backgrounds in tech and finance, neither man worked in government prior to joining DOGE last year. Cavanaugh said they originally determined which grants could be cut based on if they included certain words — like “DEI, DEIA, Equity, Inclusion, BIPAC, LGBTQ” — though the final decision about cuts was up to the head of individual agencies.

“Do you think it’s inappropriate in any way that someone in their 20s with no experience with grants for the federal government was making personal judgment calls about what grants to cancel?” an attorney asked.

“Um, no. I don’t think it’s inappropriate,” Cavanaugh said, arguing that he did not need formal education or experience to make informed judgments.

“So presumably you read some of these books that would have informed you on how to cancel a grant based on DEI,” the attorney asked.

“Um, I did not read a book, um, on how to discern whether a grant includes DEI or not. I read the actual description of the actual grant,” Cavanaugh said.

Fox said they instead turned to OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help sift through the thousands of grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

According to court filings, the men prompted ChatGPT by asking, “From the perspective of someone looking to identify DEI grants, does this involve DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters.· Begin with ‘Yes.’ o. ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation.· Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.”

Fox was repeatedly pressed by attorneys to explain certain funding decisions, such as defunding a language center — described as a “wasteful, noncritical spend” — or projects related to Black history and civil rights.

“Why is a documentary about Holocaust survivors DEI?” an attorney asked.

“It’s a gender-based story that’s inherently discriminatory to focus on this specific group,” Fox said.

According to the depositions and legal documents, the men did not provide a clear definition for DEI or take additional steps to ensure the decisions were not discriminatory — arguing it was not necessary because AI software was not the final decision-maker.

“Did you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT’s perception of DEI as applied here wouldn’t discriminate on the basis of sex?” an attorney asked, prompting another objection.

“It didn’t matter,” Fox said.

DOGE’s efforts in multiple federal agencies and departments last year faced opposition and lawsuits, with critics raising concerns about the group’s effectiveness and its access to sensitive data. 

Both Fox and Cavanaugh defended the funding decisions, arguing the cuts were necessary to reduce the deficit, though they never achieved their goals.

“Did you ever find it problematic that you were, alongside Nate, short-listing for termination projects that had hits on words like Black, homosexual, LGBTQ+?” an attorney asked, prompting an objection and follow up question.

“We were identifying wasteful spend in the government based on administration direction. That was the whole reason we were there, was to find savings,” Fox said, though he acknowledged the deficit was never reduced.

Their work cutting grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities was memorialized in a social media post by DOGE, which vowed that any future grants would be “merit-based and awarded to non-DEI, pro-America causes.”

According to the depositions, some of the saved funds were spent on the National Garden of American Heroes — a sculpture garden to commemorate the country’s 250th anniversary.

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(WASHINGTON) — Solicitor General D. John Sauer got a somewhat frosty reception from at least two key Supreme Court Justices — Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch — as oral arguments in the Supreme Court’s landmark birthright citizenship case got underway Wednesday.

President Donald Trump arrived at the Supreme Court Wednesday morning, making him the first sitting president to attend the high court’s arguments. 

Trump is asking the justices to uphold his Day 1 executive order eliminating birthright citizenship under a novel interpretation of the 14th Amendment and requiring parents to prove their own legal status before citizenship is granted to their children. 

Roberts noted that the Trump administration is relying on “very quirky” arguments, saying they are using “narrow exceptions” to claim that a much broader class of people should be ineligible for birthright citizenship. 

“You know, children of ambassadors, children of enemies during a hostile invasion, children on warships, and then you expand it to the whole class of illegal aliens here in the country. I’m not quite sure how you can get to that big group from such tiny and sort of idiosyncratic examples,” said Roberts. 

Gorsuch also remarked that the Trump administration seems to be relying on outdated “Roman law sources” and court precedents that do not work in their favor. 

“I’m not sure how much you want to rely on Wong Kim Ark,” Gorsuch remarked about the landmark 1898 case that enshrined birthright citizenship. 

Justice Elena Kagan similarly voices concerns about the sources cited by the Trump administration. 

“You’re using some pretty obscure sources to get to this concept,” she said. 

Justice Samuel Alito initiated a discussion on “illegal immigration” by noting that it was “something that was basically unknown” at the time when the 14th amendment was adopted in the 1860s. 

“What we’re dealing with here is something that was basically unknown at the time when the 14th Amendment was adopted, which is illegal immigration,” Alito said. “So how do we deal with that situation when we have a general rule?”

Sauer responded by agreeing with Alito, saying that “illegal immigration did not exist [then],” and “the problem of temporary visitors didn’t exist.”

Sauer pointed to “commentators” from 1881 to 1922 who, he claimed, were “uniformly saying the children of temporary visitors are not included.” He argued that this logic “naturally extends” to those who enter the country illegally.

Justice Elena Kagan challenged Sauer’s argument on immigration, saying his arguments in his brief did not focus on “illegal immigration.”

“Most of your brief is about people who are just temporarily in the country where there was quite clearly an experience of an understanding that there were going to be temporary inhabitants,” Kagan said. “And your whole theory of the case is built on that group.”

“You don’t get to talking about undocumented persons until quite later, and at much lesser … I think it’s like 10 pages to three pages or something like that,” she said.

Sauer began his arguments by arguing that the longstanding understanding of the 14th Amendment is incorrect. 

“The citizenship clause was adopted just after the Civil War to grant citizenship to the newly freed slaves and their children whose allegiance to the United States had been established by generations of domicile. Here, it did not grant citizenship to the children of temporary visitors or illegal aliens who have no such allegiance,” he said. 

In his opening statements, Sauer laid out one of the Trump administration’s key arguments about why birthright citizenship should not be extended to the children of undocumented immigrants, claiming that if it remains “unrestricted” it will continue to be a “pull factor for illegal immigration” and would “reward” immigrants who violate immigration laws. 

“It has spawned a sprawling industry of birth tourism as uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations have flocked to give birth in the United States in recent decades, creating a whole generation of American citizens abroad with no meaningful ties to the United States,” Sauer said. 

The Trump administration has often claimed that birth tourism — the idea that foreign nationals travel to the U.S. with the sole purpose of having a child here — poses a national security risk and undermines birthright citizenship. 

Justice Roberts pressed Sauer to explain how common the problem is, but Sauer was unable to give a clear answer.

“No one knows for sure. There’s a March 9 letter from a number of members of Congress to DHS saying, ‘Do we have any information about this?’ The media reports indicate estimates could be over one million, or 1.5 million from the People’s Republic of China alone. The congressional report that we cite in our brief talks about certain hotspots, like Russian elites coming to Miami through these birth tourism companies,” Sauer said. 

Sauer went on to claim that media reports indicate there are 500 “birth tourism companies” in China, prompting Justice Roberts to interject to ask if Sauer agreed that had “no impact on the legal analysis before us.” 

“We’re in a new world now as Justice Alito pointed out, to where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who is a U.S. citizen,” Sauer added later.

In a statement this morning, ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero addressed Trump’s attendance at the proceedings, saying he will “watch the ACLU school him in the meaning of the Constitution and birthright citizenship.” 

“Any effort to distract from the gravity and importance of this case will not succeed. The Supreme Court is up to the task of interpreting and defending the Constitution even under the glare of a sitting president a couple dozen feet away from them,” he said. 

Although the proceedings should provide a sense of how interested the judges are in Trump’s reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, a ruling in the case isn’t expected until the end of June.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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(WASHINGTON) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday that trilateral talks between Ukraine, Russia and the United States are expected to be held in the United Arab Emirates.

“I think that it will be the first trilateral meeting in Emirates. It will be tomorrow and the day after tomorrow,” Zelenskyy said as he spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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