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On March 16, 2026, Fortune reported on newly released deposition transcripts revealing that DOGE staffer Nate Cavanaugh admitted under oath that the Department of Government Efficiency had not actually reduced the federal deficit — despite deficit reduction being the primary stated justification for DOGE's creation and its sweeping interventions across federal agencies. The admission struck at the core rationale the administration had used to defend DOGE's grant cancellations, workforce reductions, and agency restructuring.
The depositions provided granular detail on DOGE's methodology at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Cavanaugh and fellow staffer Justin Fox described using ChatGPT with a single, undefined prompt to evaluate 1,163 active NEH grants. The AI tool flagged 1,057 of them — more than 90 percent — as "DEI-related," triggering the cancellation of over $100 million in funding. No definition of "DEI" was provided to the AI, no criteria were established for what would constitute a problematic grant, and no human review of the AI's determinations took place before the cancellations were executed.
Both Cavanaugh and Fox testified that they had no regrets about the process or its consequences, even as they acknowledged that the cancellations had eliminated funding for museums, historical preservation projects, humanities education programs, and individual researchers across the country. The depositions painted a picture of an operation run by young staffers with no government experience, wielding AI tools with no guardrails, to make consequential decisions affecting thousands of grant recipients and the communities they served.
The revelation that DOGE had failed to achieve its stated purpose while inflicting enormous collateral damage provided ammunition to congressional Democrats and legal challengers who argued that the organization was not a legitimate efficiency operation but a political tool designed to dismantle federal institutions under the guise of fiscal responsibility.