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 \u201cBlack\u201d and \u201chomosexual\u201d but not \u201cwhite\u201d or \u201ccaucasian;\u201d and said that one of the grants he helped slash was \u201cnot for the benefit of humankind\u201d before walking that claim back.I watched all of Fox\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s deficit.\u00a0Before 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 \u201cbuying 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.\u201d Before joining DOGE, he had no experience in government nor public grant administration, he says in the deposition.\ud83d\udca1Do you know anything else about DOGE? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.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.\u00a0A 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.\u00a0But over the course of those many hours, Fox\u2019s understanding of DEI does come out, especially when the conversation turns to how exactly Fox surfaced contracts to cut.<\/p>\n
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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: \u201cFrom 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 \u2018this initiative\u2019, or \u2018this description\u2019 in your response.\u201dIn 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 \u201cintermediary step\u201d of scanning contract descriptions before reviewing them.In one example about a documentary concerning Black civil rights, Fox says he agreed with ChatGPT\u2019s assessment that this was DEI because it \u201cfocused on a singular race.\u201dAfter a pause, Fox continues his answer and adds \u201cit is not for the benefit of humankind. It is focused on this specific group, or a specific race, here being Black.\u201dWhy would learning about anti-Black violence not be to the benefit of humankind, the plaintiffs\u2019 attorney asks.\u00a0\u201cThat\u2019s not what I\u2019m saying,\u201d Fox says, before having his response read back to him. \u201cThe way that I phrased it there wasn\u2019t exactly what I meant,\u201d he continues. \u201cIt is focused on a specific subset of race, and therefore it relates to DEI.\u201dAs the attorney points out, the scanned terms included phrases like \u201cBlack,\u201d \u201chomosexual,\u201d and \u201cLGBTQ+\u201d, but did not include \u201cwhite, “caucasian,\u201d and \u201cheterosexual.\u201dFox says he did not scan for those terms, but he \u201cvery well could have.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u201cI didn\u2019t, but going back, it would have made sense because, as we\u2019ve mentioned, there\u2019s\u2014DEI is a pretty encompassing bucket,\u201d he says at point.Fox says the job was to \u201creduce wasteful spending and non-critical spend\u201d in the context of the U.S.\u2019s two trillion dollar deficiency. When asked if he felt any remorse for those who lost grants, he says,\u00a0 \u201cSorry for those impacted, but there is a bigger problem, and that\u2019s ultimately\u2014the more important piece is reducing the government spend.\u201d\u201cIt is a necessary step in the right direction,\u201d Fox says. \u201cGrowth in government spending, leads to a debt spiral, leads to hyperinflation, leads to every American feeling 10, 12 percent inflation. It\u2019s knock-on effects of something that you can address today through non-critical spending cuts, or you can all feel tomorrow.\u201dWhen the attorney then asks if Fox would be surprised to hear if the overall deficit did not go down after DOGE\u2019s actions, Fox says no. In his own deposition, Cavanaugh acknowledged the deficit did not go down.\u201cI 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,\u201d Fox says. \u201cIn my opinion, what is certainly not wasteful is food stamps, healthcare, Medicare, Medicaid funding,\u201d Fox says. Later he adds when discussing a specific cut grant: \u201cthose dollars could be getting put to something like food stamps or Medicaid for grandma in a rural county.\u201dThere 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 \u201cyes.\u201dAfter 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\u2019t 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\u2019re 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.\u00a0In a statement published last week, American Council of Learned Societies \u200b\u200bPresident Joy Connolly said, \u201cOur lawsuit reveals this administration\u2019s contempt for that principle and for public investment in research for the common good. DOGE employees\u2019 use of ChatGPT to identify \u2018wasteful\u2019 grants is perhaps the biggest advertisement for the need for humanities education, which builds skills in critical thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"