By Mukesh 
A federal judge ruled on Thursday that the Trump administration’s cancellation of more than 1,400 previously approved grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities violated the Constitution, while also creating a broad “chilling effect.”
The ruling, issued by Judge Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court in Manhattan, addressed two lawsuits brought by scholarly groups and individual grant recipients. The plaintiffs had argued that the cuts, carried out by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, violated the First Amendment and, by singling out work relating to particular groups, the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment.
In her 143-page ruling, Judge McMahon ordered the agency to rescind the cuts while saying the plaintiffs had suffered “irreparable injury.”
“The injury is not limited to the loss of money,” Judge McMahon said. “It includes the 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.”
The humanities agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuits were filed last spring, shortly after the Trump administration dismissed the agency’s chairman and began making sweeping efforts to redirect it to President Trump’s “America First” cultural program.
In April 2025, a few weeks after DOGE arrived at the agency, its newly appointed acting chair, Michael McDonald, canceled most grants approved during the Biden administration, telling recipients only that funding was being shifted “in furtherance of the president’s agenda.” The cuts, totaling more than $100 million, threw organizations and projects across the country into disarray, causing some to shut down entirely.
In the meantime, the agency began limiting some grant programs to projects relating to “Western civilization” while also directing funds to Trump-backed projects like the National Garden of American Heroes, a planned patriotic sculpture garden.
The lawsuits challenging the grant cuts drew wide attention this spring, when the plaintiffs filed documents showing that two DOGE employees had used ChatGPT to flag grants that violated Mr. Trump’s executive orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
The two employees, Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox, also used keywords like “L.G.B.T.Q.,” “BIPOC,” “equality,” “immigration” and “citizenship” to draw up a list of the “craziest” grants, which DOGE later publicized online.
After publication of a New York Times article about the case, clips from videotaped depositions by Mr. Cavanaugh and Mr. Fox spread widely on social media, drawing harsh criticisms and sometimes ridicule for their attempts to explain why grants supporting a documentary about the Holocaust or a new museum HVAC system were deemed to be “D.E.I.”
The men, both in their late 20s and recently recruited from jobs in technology and finance, said that they had no background in the humanities or government but that they believed in DOGE’s broader goal of shrinking “useless small agencies,” as Mr. Cavanaugh put it.
As clips ricocheted across social media, government lawyers requested that the plaintiffs who had posted the depositions online take them down, saying that Mr. Fox and Mr. Cavanaugh had experienced harassment and threats. But Judge McMahon said they could remain online, citing “the public’s right to understand the operations of their government.”
In her ruling on Thursday, Judge McMahon said that Mr. McDonald had improperly ceded authority to DOGE and that the cuts had departed significantly from the agency’s typical procedures, as well as its 1965 founding legislation passed by Congress.
That law, she wrote, “does not authorize the wholesale revocation of grants already awarded simply because a new administration disagrees with the decisions of a previous administration or prefers to redirect funds elsewhere.”
In February, Mr. Trump nominated Mr. McDonald as permanent chair, which requires Senate confirmation.
The plaintiffs in the two cases included the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Authors Guild and a group of individual scholars.
Joy Connolly, the president of the American Council of Learned Societies, said in a statement that the ruling was a victory for the Americans in all 50 states who are served by programs the endowment supports.
“The humanities are not a luxury,” she said. “They are how a democracy understands itself. Today’s decision is a step toward honoring the will of Congress and our mission as a nation — to seek the truth, know ourselves and build a better future on that knowledge.”