Former DOGE employees give an inside look at the Elon Musk-led agency
Thanks to a lawsuit against DOGE, we are now getting an inside look at what happened at the government agency formerly led by Elon Musk and the type of people Musk hired to run it.
In May of last year, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the American Historical Association (AHA), and the Modern Language Association (MLA) filed a lawsuit in federal district court in an attempt to reverse DOGE's cuts to the the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). These cuts eliminated entire divisions and programs, which included grants.
As a result of the lawsuit, two employees at DOGE, Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh were deposed. Videos of those hours-long depositions with Musk's DOGE employees have just been uploaded to YouTube.
So, how did Elon Musk's government agency determine what to cut? They asked ChatGPT.
“Does the following relate at all to DEI?” is the prompt DOGE regularly used, giving the AI chatbot further direction to make things as simple for them as possible, the employees revealed.
The DOGE employees inducted ChatGPT to provide a "yes" or "no" answer with an explanation that was shorter than 120 characters.
Most notably, but perhaps unsurprising, is just how uniformed the two DOGE employees appear to be. The two admit to being inexperienced, having zero experience in government before joining DOGE. Clips from the deposition uploaded by 404 Media have already gone viral on the internet showcasing how Fox struggles for some time in trying to define what DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is yet they were tasked with defunding any programs that they deemed to be DEI.
Fox claimed that documentaries concerning Black civil rights or a film that focused on Jewish women in the Holocaust would be defunded by DOGE because both would be considered DEI.
Fox reasoned that these should be defunded because they focused on a "specific group or a specific race" and were "not for the benefit of humankind."
During the deposition, Fox provides a stunning omission that DOGE made in weeding out programs it decided were DEI.
DOGE would search programs and grants to cut using terms such as “Black," "gender," “LGBTQ+," and "equality." However, DOGE would not search for cuts from anything involving terms like "caucasian” and “heterosexual.”
In his deposition, Cavanaugh shared the labeling system he had for grants that DOGE was looking to cut such as "craziest." The DOGE worker labeled dozens of LGBTQ+ related grants with that designation.
Fox, Cavanaugh, and other DOGE workers were tasked with cutting trillions of dollars from the U.S. deficit by Elon Musk. DOGE managed to cut hundreds of billions of dollars. However, despite DOGE's cuts, the deficit increased. DOGE was disbanded in November 2025.
Investigations are now underway involving DOGE and its inexperienced employees hired by Musk. In one such new case, one DOGE employee allegedly lifted social security records, stored them on a USB drive, and took them to his next job in the private sector.
Fox made $150,000 while working with DOGE. Cavanaugh made $120,000.