type: timeline_event
On March 13, 2026, federal Judge Colleen McMahon ordered plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging DOGE's cancellation of National Endowment for the Humanities grants to remove viral deposition videos from YouTube. The videos, which had been viewed millions of times, showed DOGE staffers Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox testifying under oath about their use of ChatGPT to evaluate and cancel NEH grants — and expressing "no regrets" about the impact on people who lost their income as a result.
The deposition footage had become a flashpoint in the national debate over DOGE's methods. In the videos, Cavanaugh and Fox described feeding grant descriptions into ChatGPT with a single, undefined prompt to determine whether grants were "DEI-related," a process that led to the cancellation of more than $100 million in funding. Their cavalier demeanor and lack of remorse struck a nerve with the public and went viral across social media platforms.
The Trump administration argued that the videos' wide dissemination had caused harassment of the DOGE staffers and their families, and that continued public access posed a safety risk. Judge McMahon agreed to order the takedown, though she did not issue a broader gag order on the underlying testimony itself. Civil liberties groups immediately criticized the decision as a troubling restriction on public access to court proceedings.
The order ignited a fierce debate about transparency and the public's right to see how federal employees carrying out DOGE's mission described their own work. Critics argued that the deposition testimony was a matter of overwhelming public interest — showing government officials using AI tools with no oversight to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in grants — and that suppressing it served only to shield the administration from accountability.