A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration from carrying out the termination of National Endowment for the Humanities grants, ruling that DOGE’s cuts were unlawful and beyond the authority of the staffers who ordered them. U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon said the process used to wipe out the awards did not resemble the agency’s normal grant review and could not stand.
The decision halted what was described as the largest mass termination of federal grants in the history of the National Endowment for the Humanities. McMahon said there could be no serious dispute that DOGE’s review process did not conform to NEH’s ordinary grant-review system, and she said the government had “blatantly used” race, gender and other protected characteristics to carry out the cuts.
McMahon’s ruling was not just about procedure. She said treating Black civil-rights history, Jewish testimony about the Holocaust, the Asian American experience, the treatment of the children of Native tribes, or even the mere mention of a woman as a sign of wastefulness or lack of merit was not lawful. She also said it was deeply troubling to disfavor a project about Jewish women because it centered on Jewish cultures and female voices.
The case centered on cuts to humanities grants at the National Endowment for the Humanities, where the administration’s review process collided with a broader drive to slash federal spending after President Donald Trump returned to office in January. Within days of his return, agencies were told to put DEI staff on leave and related programs were shuttered, setting the stage for the grant cuts that later drew the court fight.
ABC News reported in March that depositions from two former DOGE staffers, Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, described the use of ChatGPT and DEI keywords in the cutting process. Cavanaugh said grants were originally flagged for cuts based on words including DEI, DEIA, Equity, Inclusion, BIPAC and LGBTQ, before the final decision was passed to the head of each agency.
Cavanaugh was asked whether the goal was really to target those programs, and he answered: “No. I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from $2 trillion to close to zero.” McMahon’s ruling makes clear that that explanation did not save the process. By the court’s reading, DOGE staffers lacked the authority to decide which NEH grants lived or died, and the terminations cannot go forward.
