Over the course of a six hour long or so deposition, Justin Fox, a former investment banker turned DOGE bro, refused to define what he believes counts as DEI; admitted he used ChatGPT to scan government contracts for terms such as “Black” and “homosexual” but not “white” or “caucasian;” and said that one of the grants he helped slash was “not for the benefit of humankind” before walking that claim back.
I watched all of Fox’s deposition from start to finish. The terse exchanges, the circular arguments, the pregnant pauses, all of it. The videos, available publicly on YouTube, were released as part of a lawsuit by the Modern Language Association, American Council of Learned Societies, and American Historical Association. They provide fascinating, or perhaps horrifying, insight into the thinking of someone inside DOGE. Even with Fox’s inability to answer seemingly easy questions, the responses are still illustrative of the recklessness and hamfisted nature of a group of young, inexperienced people who caused massive damage across the U.S. government, leading to negative consequences outside of it. DOGE as an organization has been linked to 300,000 deaths due to its cuts and multiple significant data breaches. All the while, DOGE did not actually reduce the government’s deficit.
Before joining DOGE, Fox was an associate at the Los Angeles-based private equity firm Nexus Capital. Now he is a co-founder of a company called Special, with Nate Cavanaugh, another DOGE member. Fox says the company is “buying businesses in senior care, adopting technology to pay the nurses and caregivers more, so that the aging population has enough nurses to meet the demand.” Before joining DOGE, he had no experience in government nor public grant administration, he says in the deposition.
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In his time at DOGE, and specifically the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Fox was part of a team that cut hundreds of millions of dollars worth of grants they claimed were related to DEI, which included funding for a documentary about violence against women during the Holocaust, for example.
A sizable part of the deposition is spent trying to have Fox define what DEI means, or explain his understanding of it. Instead, he defers to the Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing Executive Order, saying DEI is laid out in that EO, but he cannot recall it.
But over the course of those many hours, Fox’s understanding of DEI does come out, especially when the conversation turns to how exactly Fox surfaced contracts to cut.
As the New York Times reported, the team used ChatGPT to scan contracts for what it perceived as DEI-related contracts. A prompt Fox used, included in the deposition, reads: “From the perspective of someone looking to identify DEI grants, does this involve DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with yes or no, followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’, or ‘this description’ in your response.”
In the deposition, Fox says no one asked him to use an LLM to scan the contract descriptions, and says he used ChatGPT for what he described as the “intermediary step” of scanning contract descriptions before reviewing them.
In one example about a documentary concerning Black civil rights, Fox says he agreed with ChatGPT’s assessment that this was DEI because it “focused on a singular race.”
After a pause, Fox continues his answer and adds “it is not for the benefit of humankind. It is focused on this specific group, or a specific race, here being Black.”
Why would learning about anti-Black violence not be to the benefit of humankind, the plaintiffs’ attorney asks.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Fox says, before having his response read back to him. “The way that I phrased it there wasn’t exactly what I meant,” he continues. “It is focused on a specific subset of race, and therefore it relates to DEI.”
As the attorney points out, the scanned terms included phrases like “Black,” “homosexual,” and “LGBTQ+”, but did not include “white, “caucasian,” and “heterosexual.”
Fox says he did not scan for those terms, but he “very well could have.”
“I didn’t, but going back, it would have made sense because, as we’ve mentioned, there’s—DEI is a pretty encompassing bucket,” he says at point.
Fox says the job was to “reduce wasteful spending and non-critical spend” in the context of the U.S.’s two trillion dollar deficiency. When asked if he felt any remorse for those who lost grants, he says, “Sorry for those impacted, but there is a bigger problem, and that’s ultimately—the more important piece is reducing the government spend.”
“It is a necessary step in the right direction,” Fox says. “Growth in government spending, leads to a debt spiral, leads to hyperinflation, leads to every American feeling 10, 12 percent inflation. It’s knock-on effects of something that you can address today through non-critical spending cuts, or you can all feel tomorrow.”
When the attorney then asks if Fox would be surprised to hear if the overall deficit did not go down after DOGE’s actions, Fox says no. In his own deposition, Cavanaugh acknowledged the deficit did not go down.
“I have to believe that the dollars that were saved went to mission critical, non-wasteful spending, and so, again, in the broad macro: an unfortunate circumstance for an individual, but this is an effort for the administration,” Fox says. “In my opinion, what is certainly not wasteful is food stamps, healthcare, Medicare, Medicaid funding,” Fox says. Later he adds when discussing a specific cut grant: “those dollars could be getting put to something like food stamps or Medicaid for grandma in a rural county.”
There is no evidence these funds were directed in that way. The Trump administration has kicked millions of people off of food stamps. It has, just as an example, given ICE tens of billions of more dollars, though.
When asked several times if he believes that his $150,000 salary was not wasteful spend, because he was hired to save hundreds of millions of dollars, Fox says “yes.”
After watching hours upon hours of this footage, what stands out to me is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the arrogance. The surefootedness that this was the correct thing to do despite no experience in government. The presumption that they were entitled to use their own uninformed judgement to cut funds to things that they don’t personally value but do positively impact others. Even by their own metrics of merit based activity, this campaign was a failure. Fox believes these particular cut contracts did save hundreds of millions of dollars, but the cuts ultimately did not reduce the deficit. Not even close.
It makes for strangely captivating viewing, seeing someone part of a team that has caused so much damage coldly explain the flawed thinking behind what they did. The answers are sometimes defensive and coached because they’re in a lawsuit, of course. But taken as a whole they show at least these members of DOGE are essentially unapologetic for what they did.
In a statement published last week, American Council of Learned Societies President Joy Connolly said, “Our lawsuit reveals this administration’s contempt for that principle and for public investment in research for the common good. DOGE employees’ use of ChatGPT to identify ‘wasteful’ grants is perhaps the biggest advertisement for the need for humanities education, which builds skills in critical thinking.”
About the author
Joseph is an award-winning investigative journalist focused on generating impact. His work has triggered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fines, shut down tech companies, and much more.
