Efforts to find out what Musk’s DOGE Did and How they Did IT have revealed their actions as part of a lawsuit over cuts to grants awarded to the National Endowment for the Humanities…
The legal digging seems to expose a haphazard operation that had little to no oversight and little input from the departments and agencies that cuts where made resulting in drastic funding cuts and employee layoffs…
“DOGE felt more like a club,” Justin Fox, an investment banker turned DOGE staffer, told attorneys in one of the video depositions released last month.
A year after Elon Musk brought in a cohort of allies from Silicon Valley to remake the government, through a newly established Department of Government Efficiency, lawsuits and public record releases have steadily begun shedding light on who was in DOGE and how its members approached their roles.
The depositions, in a lawsuit over DOGE using ChatGPT to propose cuts to about 1,400 humanities grants, have answered some questions about how the group — which is not part of the Cabinet — formed and operated with little scrutiny. In one moment that went viral, Fox was asked why he described a documentary about female Holocaust victims as “inherently discriminatory” and sought to cut off its federal funding. In another, his colleague Nathan Cavanaugh acknowledged that DOGE did not reduce the federal deficit.
The disclosures have confirmed news coverage from last year about the extent of DOGE cuts and identified several key DOGE figures operating in federal agencies. For instance, in January, the Department of Energy responded to liberal watchdog group American Oversight’s requests for the names and titles of members of its DOGE team, acknowledging one previously unnamed member: Alexander Glaubach, a former tech investor, who has since launched an artificial intelligence start-up. In response to one of the lawsuits, the government shared two lists of 188 people whom it identified as being part of DOGE, including career civil servants at the former U.S. Digital Service and contractors at an HR firm. The lists excluded at least 19 DOGE members whom The Washington Post previously identified, according to an analysis of records….
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The Trump administration has fought to withhold information about what DOGE did and argued that the group is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, asking the Supreme Court last month to overturn an order from the U.S. District Court for D.C. to provide records to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). The administration has also argued that Musk and Amy Gleason, the person who the administration had said was leading DOGE, should not have to sit for depositions.
CREW’s chief counsel, Nikhel Sus, said the effort to shield DOGE from FOIA mandates is a delay tactic to impede CREW’s ability to access records — and hold up other cases.
“There’s a domino effect,” Sus told The Post. “These delay tactics are impeding the ability to get answers in this case and other cases.”….
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The plaintiffs in the case — American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association — have argued that the terminations violated the First Amendment and the equal protection clause for unfairly targeting grants for political reasons, noting that grants awarded during the previous Democratic administration were the particular focus. The Trump administration has argued that the cancellations don’t violate the First Amendment because the government is not obligated to subsidize projects it no longer believes to be in the public interest.
The plaintiffs have also argued that DOGE had unprecedented control, and they shared records received through discovery that showed how officials at the NEH appeared to have capitulated to DOGE, though members said in depositions that their role was to advise….
Note…
In the end?
Trump’s cabinet and agencies heads revolted and pushed the President to curtail the DOGE actions along the MASSIVE media coverage and pressure along with Federal judges actions…
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