DOGE Culture Fiasco, a Court Decision, and Rule by ChatGPT

Rule No. 1 in cutting arts funding is ‘don’t look stupid.’

I t’s still chilly here in ye olde Vermont and weeks from our “Brigadoon” spurts in late July into August and leaf-peeping week in October. So it’s very quiet, which gives me time to read things such as the 143-page American Council of Learned Societies v. National Endowment for the Humanities, the decision from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, issued on May 6, that invalidates the cancellation of around 1,400 NEH grants on orders from the Elon Musk DOGE team. The decision — what Judge Colleen McMahon wrote — is horrifying on so many counts. Everyone seems to have gone heavy-metal whackadoodle.

DOGE, which probably works well in cases of mass fraud, jumped into the doings of NEH in early 2025. It applied ChatGPT to a long list of NEH grants that had been made, but not yet paid, during the idiocracy, kleptocracy, and witch’s coven of the Biden years. Using one-paragraph grant descriptions, DOGE asked the AI bloodhound, “Does the following relate at all to DEI?” Many hundreds of grants were identified. Two DOGE staffers in their twenties, with no humanities experience aside from college courses, then looked in the short grant descriptions for words such as “indigenous,” “tribal,” “gay,” “native,” “melting pot,” “marginalized,” “equality,” “citizenship,” and “immigrants.” “Latinx,” a word nearly everyone with Spanish-acculturated heritage hates, “equity,” “BIPOC,” and “climate,” to me, are poison pills, and they were on the list as well. All seem to have been axed, around 1,400 grants worth more than $322 million. Gradually, the Feds have been reversing DOGE’s decision and restoring the grants. Now, a federal court has gone steps further.

First, that quagmire called “process” — bureaucrats use it to smother ideas and projects they don’t like, but the NEH’s process is clear, short, and prescribed by statute. First, in-house specialists and outside specialists, forming a panel, review applications. Those recommended by panels go to the NEH chairperson, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. He decides which recommendations go to the National Council on the Humanities, sending most to the council and pulling some at his discretion. He doesn’t need to state a reason, but he has a box of tissues and some ’splainin’ to do when staff comes crying.

I’ve looked at every successful NEH grant description since I started writing for NR. That’s thousands of grants. I would have ditched some, but not many, as too woke, and many more as too exotic, which means foreign, since I think NEH should give an edge to American topics.

The council, whose members are also appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, votes yes or no on the recommendations that the chairperson sends to them. Judge McMahon ruled, and this makes sense, that, by statute, the council and chairperson have to be the “terminators” of the grants. President Trump fired nearly everyone on the council, leaving a quorum-less four. The NEH chairperson signed the termination letters, but the court found as an issue of fact that DOGE did the terminating.

What died by DOGE? A grant for a biography of Larry Kramer, the AIDS activist and playwright? Felled by the word “gay.” A project to fund multispectral imaging of fragments of the apocryphal book of Jubilees and the Testament of Moses to broaden our understanding of ancient Jewish thought? Felled by “Jewish thought,” tagged by ChatGPT as too much diversity and too tailored to a single culture. A study of Chinese Communist oppression of the poor Uyghurs and their forced assimilation, surveillance, and concentration camps? Felled by “erasure.” That’s a pop woke word for someone like Angela Davis having fewer biographies than, say, Lincoln.

Digitizing mid-century African-American newspapers in Los Angeles for the National Digital Newspaper program? Felled by “inclusion.” A grant for a documentary on the experience of Jewish women slave laborers during the Holocaust? “Gender-based violence” and “it focuses on the females in a culture.” The judge found that all grants studying African-American history and culture got the hook, as did Native American themes. “Focused on a singular race,” DOGE said. The New Bedford Whaling Museum’s grant for a new gallery displaying a skeleton of a whale? DOGE harpooned it because of the words “visitor-responsive,” “inclusive,” “inquiry-based,” and “impactful experience.” “Inclusive,” and that grant’s dead as that whale. I’m surprised they didn’t cite the whale’s being marginalized as the reason they killed the grant.

A grant to digitize Arthur Fiedler’s Boston Pops concerts from the 1950s into the late ’70s? According to DOGE, “preserving and making accessible historical recordings promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion by sharing valuable cultural heritage.” Come on, people, we’re talking about John Philip Sousa marches! Everyone loved them. The DOGE staff playing taps for this grant must’ve spent too much time on a Musk spaceship. I hate DEI, but lots of topics in the humanities haven’t been explored. That keeps us scholars in business. What’s toxic about DEI is reducing everything to a “race explains everything” and “everything’s about oppressors and the oppressed” analysis. That’s ideology posing as scholarship. It kills humanity and nuance.

On and on it goes. DOGE in part blamed ChatGPT, but, and the decision states the obvious, we’re not ruled by ChatGPT. The judge compared it to Flip Wilson’s character Geraldine crying “The Devil made me do it.” That gave me a giggle. I wish I’d thought of that. By the by, Judge McMahon — a Clinton judge, but I won’t send her to the gallows for it — wrote a lucid, engaging opinion. Most judges are terrible writers.

Google’s mantra for its staff is “don’t be evil” — a goal, alas, that they often fail to meet. For Chicago pols, it’s “don’t make no waves, don’t back no losers.” Mine for Trump’s culture team is “don’t look stupid.” Or like buffoons. Or like yahoos. Entrusting the cancellation of grants to twentysomething tech nerds was a big mistake.

Nearly everyone on the administration side looks awful. But it’s also horrifying that Judge McMahon ruled that the NEH — and, I presume, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute for Museum and Library Services – can’t discriminate on the basis of content, or what she calls “viewpoint.” It’s unconstitutional via the First Amendment, she argued, since DEI themes are private speech — that the views are disfavored is not reason enough for the government to deny funds to their proponents. So NEH can’t nix a grant application because the project is tiresome, vapid, redundant, bigoted, overwrought, unfounded, unsound, undercooked, or just plain junk? This will force the NEH to work in self-imposed stealth or in disingenuous silence, since, in reality, many applications will always be nixed for these and other reasons related to viewpoint.

The NEH boss, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, should be able to say, “These ideas interest me,” “these ideas are empty,” “these ideas are bad,” “these ideas are overrepresented” or “underrepresented.” Now, the fact that an applicant’s viewpoint stinks — think of the “you’re either oppressed or an oppressor” line from the race pimps Nikole Hannah-Jones or Ibram X. Kendi — is not a legitimate reason for the NEH to deny the grant. But the NEH isn’t killing their ideas. Applicants are free to look for money elsewhere, like the Mellon Foundation or the Terra Foundation, which funds race pimps for a living. Don’t think for a minute that the NEH and NEA have been killing proposals from right-of-center — commonsensical — for years and will continue, acting as a cabal, regardless of what a mere judge rules.

Alas, now we have a federal judge ruling that this is unconstitutional, and, as far as I know, the NEH isn’t appealing.

***

The big museum news of the month is the absorption of the Neue Galerie by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Neue Galerie, on Fifth Avenue and 86th Street, is a small and much-loved boutique museum focused on modern German and Austrian art. It’s in a grand Carrère and Hastings townhouse from 1914. Since it opened its doors in 2001, it’s done dozens of wonderful exhibitions and displayed a superb permanent collection. Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer II, also called The Woman in Gold, is there. Ronald Lauder is the main man behind the Neue Galerie in terms of funding, and he’s given it many works from his art collection, especially rich in Klimt and Schiele but also the other Austrian Secession greats and German Expressionists. All will belong to the Met.

I was surprised at the news, but it makes sense, I’ll grudgingly admit. The Neue Galerie hasn’t shown much borrowing power in the last couple of marquee exhibitions I reviewed. Lauder put tens of millions behind it, but no cup overfloweth forever, though his cup’s got Grand Canyon depth and girth. He said his stipulations run “about 30 pages,” a good idea. In New York, it doesn’t exist if it’s not in writing. During the financial crunch of Covid, the Met behaved abominably, selling art, staying closed for months not to stop Covid but to save money, and fudging its finances to lure gullible donors.

The fate of the Neue Galerie, 25 years old this November, raises the question of whether other mergers and acquisitions might make sense not only in New York but in other cities that have a big civic museum and small focused museums.

***

On May 18, the House of Representatives voted 216–204 to reject a bill designating a location for a new Smithsonian women’s history museum because Republicans insisted that the museum concern itself with women rather than women as well as men who say they’re women. So, for now, this fool’s errand is on life support. Why didn’t DOGE nuke it when it had the chance? Democrats voted to reject the bill, joined by a few Republicans who said they think it’s not worth strangling the museum in its cradle over this. The other day, driving on the highway through Bridgeport, I saw onion domes of Iranistan, P. T. Barnum’s house. Barnum was from Bridgeport and was, in an unlikely twist in a career with many turns, Bridgeport’s mayor. He’s thought to have said that “there’s a sucker born every minute,” and anyone thinking the women’s history museum won’t be focused on trans women, Code Pink, NARAL, and pussy hats is a big rainbow-whirly-lollipop kind of sucker.

I hope this will be a poison pill, but I doubt it. This museum and the future National Museum of the American Latino, both wastes of tax dollars and abuses of philanthropy, are like cockroaches.

There are too many museums — and monuments — in Washington, and the Smithsonian privately doesn’t want these museums. Both will become woke cesspools, spouting trendy Beltway thinking and touting women and Latinos who are creatures of government. Plenty of museums in Washington already foreground unheralded women. Nearly every Smithsonian museum has a current exhibition focused on women. Even the National Zoo has one — on its homepage, and in press releases, it’s now highlighting the recent birth of a baby elephant. The mother’s female. And the new calf? It’s a girl!