Chat, is this the banality of evil?
DOGE staffers tell all, giving us a cautionary tale about fascism and A.I. -- and a preview of what future truth and reconciliation hearings might look like
In today’s letter: An ongoing lawsuit against DOGE reveals the machinery of the MAGA plan to remake American education — and makes the case for saving the humanities.
If The Ink helps you understand these times and this community keeps you sane, join us today.
Don’t mess with historians — they know where to find the receipts.
Last year, the American Historical Association, the Authors Guild, American Council of Learned Societies, and Modern Language Association filed a lawsuit against DOGE and the National Endowment for the Humanities, challenging the dismantling of the agency and the termination of its grants. As the suit has progressed through the courts, the plaintiffs’ legal team discovered some disturbing things, which were released to the public this week.
The big revelation was that Elon Musk’s team of junior programmers used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to recommend decisions about terminating grants — terminations that, the lawsuit holds, were illegal. The DOGE staffers then made those decisions, turning the NEH into a shell of its former self, and cutting off a major source of education funding and public understanding.
Depositions reveal that DOGE team members made the decisions about funding—despite having no legal authority to do so; document the use of Signal by DOGE and NEH staff to communicate about their process in violation of the Federal Records Act; and make clear that some grants were terminated despite NEH staff concluding that they did not conflict with new policies coming from the Trump Administration.
But bad as that all is, it’s not even close to the lawsuit’s most disturbing revelation.