Washington — In a significant legal decision on Thursday, a federal judge declared that the Trump administration’s sweeping cancellation of humanities grants awarded to three prominent scholarly organizations was both “unlawful” and “unconstitutional.”
Back in April 2025, the Department of Government and Efficiency (DOGE) abruptly revoked thousands of grants that had been approved by Congress through the National Endowment for the Humanities. Among the affected organizations were the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Modern Language Association of America.
These groups promptly filed a lawsuit in May 2025, seeking to overturn the administration’s actions. They contended that the dismantling of the National Endowment for the Humanities was “unlawful many times over,” emphasizing that the executive branch “lacks constitutional authority to block, amend, subvert, or delay spending appropriations based solely on the president’s policy preferences.”
In her ruling on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon stated that the grant cancellations violated both the First Amendment and the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment. She further noted that DOGE officials did not have the statutory authority to execute the terminations and barred the administration from implementing them.
This ruling was combined with a separate lawsuit filed by The Authors Guild, whose members had also been recipients of grant funding.
The 143-page decision revealed that DOGE staff admitted they had not reviewed any of the grant applications or related materials when deciding which grants to terminate. Instead, they used ChatGPT to generate justifications for canceling the grants, citing diversity, equity, and inclusion-related reasons.
McMahon wrote in the opinion that the DOGE staff tasked with leading the effort were in their 20s and “did not have much experience in anything at all — certainly not in anything remotely related to the humanities.”
