Federal Judge Restores Millions in NEH Grants

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon found that the mass termination of more than 1,400 grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities was unconstitutional. 

In April 2025, NEH officials and staff from the Department of Government Efficiency canceled grants representing over $100 million in congressionally appropriated funds. 

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The following month, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association of America sued to reverse the terminations. 

In documents revealed during discovery of the summary judgment, DOGE officials admitted that they used ChatGPT to identify which grants were in violation of the president’s anti-DEI executive orders. Grants containing words such as “history,” “culture” and “identity” were flagged by AI as relating to DEI. 

The judge ruled that DOGE officials violated the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights and the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment and terminated the grants without any statutory authority to do so. 

In her ruling, McMahon said DOGE staffers, both in their 20s, “did not have much experience in anything at all—certainly not in anything remotely related to the humanities.”

She also noted that the plaintiffs’ loss is not limited to lost grant funding, but also includes “disruption of protected expression, the interruption of ongoing research and publication, the cancellation or suspension of humanities programming, and the chilling effect caused by the Government’s use of viewpoint-based and unauthorized criteria to terminate federal grants.”  

ACLS president Joy Connolly said in a statement that the victory “belongs to the scholars, students, colleges, universities, associations, state humanities councils, libraries, and local organizations in all fifty states whose work was abruptly disrupted last year.

“ACLS will continue to press for the full restoration of NEH’s staff, programs, and capacity to serve the public it was created to support.”