Inside DOGE’s early days of pressure campaigns, rule breaking and ‘chaos’
“Mike - Call me when you get the chance. We need a game plan for effectuating [reductions in force], final grant terminations and contract cancellations by tomorrow AM. We will carry these plans out before the end of the week,” wrote that associate, Justin Fox, in the last one.
“We're getting pressure from the top on this and we'd prefer that you remain on our side but let us know if you're no longer interested,” the email read.
It had been a few weeks since Fox and Nathan Cavanaugh, also an employee inside DOGE, had first met with McDonald. They’d been sent into the agency by Steve Davis, the operational head of DOGE at the time and key ally of billionaire Elon Musk, to make cuts after President Donald Trump fired the former head of the agency.
In the coming days, NEH, which primarily funds research and preservation projects at universities and museums, would issue termination letters for about 1,400 grants and send layoff notices to 116 of its employees—two-thirds of its workforce.
A coalition of humanities organizations has since sued NEH over the grant cuts. Clips from depositions done in the course of the lawsuit have gone viral for what many see as Cavanaugh and Fox’s disdain for NEH work, and for their inability or unwillingness to define diversity, equity and inclusion, given that DOGE cancelled many grants under the banner of ridding the government of DEI.
At one point, Fox said that a grant for a documentary about the Colfax Massacre, believed to be the deadliest incident of racial violence during Reconstruction, represented DEI because it “focused on a singular race,” meaning that “it’s not for the benefit of humankind.” He later said that wasn’t what he meant after being read back his testimony, noting that it’s “very subjective.”
McDonald, a long-tenured career employee who Trump tapped to lead NEH on a temporary basis, made clear in his own deposition that his “political views align with those of the administration.”
He sought to work hand in glove with DOGE, but even he expressed reservations about its sweeping approach and disregard for agency rules. In the more than 20 years he had worked at NEH, the agency had canceled fewer than six grants, he said.
A Manhattan judge ordered that the videos be taken down on Friday after the government said that Fox had been harassed and gotten death threats because of them.
Government Executive had already reviewed all of them, more than 23 hours in total. They offer rare insight into how DOGE operated last year as it fanned out across government agencies, including details on its disjointed reporting structure, its chaotic decision making process and its zealous pressure campaign against career civil servants and Trump administration appointees alike.
Previous reporting from Government Executive and other media outlets demonstrated these tactics employed at NEH were similar to those DOGE deployed throughout government, though the depositions provide an unprecedented look at an entity that had gone to great lengths to conceal its operations.
‘A rather stressful period’
At NEH, Fox’s emails were a “time-pressure tactic,” Cavanaugh said during his deposition, admitting that he and Fox weren’t themselves getting any pressure from “the top.”
“Mike’s perception of where DOGE sat within the federal government was we had a direct line of communication with the White House,” he said of the acting chair. “We would tell Mike that we were getting pressure from basically the White House to effectuate these contract and grant terminations that were aligned with the [executive order], so it was a time-pressure tactic.”
The DOGE team went so far as to tell NEH leadership to disregard its internal rules and not question the legality of its actions.
“What I told them was that these are the procedures in place that we normally follow,” McDonald said of his conversations with DOGE at the time. “They said that there was no need to follow the procedures, and if there was litigation, which has since occurred, this would be addressed in the litigation.”
The acting chair made clear that the tactics DOGE deployed were effective.
"It was a rather stressful period and we were all under a lot of pressure,” McDonald said, adding Fox had insisted on an arbitrary deadline in March to issue the grant terminations. “So yeah, there was frustration over the overall process, the time constraints that were put upon us, or me in particular.”
Fox and Cavanaugh were at NEH as part of their work on the “small agencies team” at DOGE, of which Cavanaugh was the “informal” lead. Cavanaugh led the first meeting with McDonald, and Fox subsequently took the lead role in reviewing the agency’s books for cuts.
The goal was to identify wasteful spending within the “useless” small agencies in the federal government or effectively eliminate them altogether, said Cavanaugh. In doing so, he and Fox were “comfortable applying pressure to the extent we needed to,” he said.
“We wanted to try and get the agency heads to act quickly on their proposed plans,” he said. “I’ve done the same thing at other agencies.”
Cavanaugh, Fox and the others on their team worked out of the General Services Administration with other DOGE employees.
The team’s structure was loose—Cavanaugh said in the deposition that he reported to Davis, who he says wasn’t intimately involved in his day-to-day work. Fox, meanwhile, viewed GSA’s then-acting administrator Stephen Ehikian as his boss.
“DOGE felt more like a club of folks with a different mission than traditional folks that were career employees,” said Fox, who was being paid a $150,000 salary at GSA.
Other DOGE employees were based at different executive offices, although they often detailed out to additional agencies from those home offices, making it difficult to know who was from where, said Cavanaugh.
At the top of DOGE, Cavanaugh said he viewed Davis as the leader, despite the Trump administration repeatedly labeling Amy Gleason as the acting administrator of the cost-cutting enterprise. Cavanaugh noted during his deposition that he didn’t know how Gleason’s role related to Davis’ job, or even what her role was. She never led any of the weekly or biweekly DOGE meetings while he was in government.
The depositions also offer a glimpse into the ad hoc nature of the DOGE recruiting process.
A 2020 graduate of the University of Virginia who worked in private equity, Fox got involved in DOGE through a friend whose father, Anthony Armstrong, was a “mentor.” Currently the chief financial officer at Musk’s xAI, Armstrong himself worked at the Office of Personnel Management as part of DOGE.
Asked if he formally interviewed for his government job, Fox initially said that he “didn’t remember,” before saying that he talked to several then-leaders at GSA over the secure messaging app Signal before joining.
Cavanaugh joined DOGE after starting a series of tech companies. Before that, he attended Indiana University for one year. Venture capital fund manager Baris Akis, who he called an “informal” recruiter for DOGE, introduced him to Davis. Cavanaugh had no government or political experience and hadn’t taken any government-focused classes.
He joined DOGE after three conversations with Baris and Davis, went through a day or two of standard onboarding for GSA and got to work. He didn’t receive any specific training, he said. NEH officials testified that the DOGE duo possessed no expertise in NEH’s typical work.
Flouting rules
In January, government employees began combing through open grants at NEH to rate how they fared in terms of DEI, “gender ideology,” and environmental justice—all concepts Trump had tasked agencies with rooting out in a day-one executive order.
Fox conducted additional reviews once he and Cavanaugh landed at the agency, especially concentrating on the grants that NEH staff had marked as “NA” for DEI and, after that, all the grants awarded during the Biden administration.
He used ChatGPT to screen grant descriptions for DEI involvement, asking for responses under 120 characters.
This tactic was apparently not known to the head of the small agencies DOGE team at the time, as Cavanaugh said during his deposition that Fox didn’t use AI to come up with the DEI decisions, adding that it was “well understood” that “how we reviewed grants at DOGE for DEI is by reading them.”
The pair also cancelled grants under the mandate to rid the government of “waste” and reduce the deficit, said Cavanaugh.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told Government Executive that “President Trump was given a clear mandate to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from the federal government” when asked to comment.
“In just a year, he has made significant progress in making the federal government more efficient to better serve the American taxpayer,” he said.
One of Cavanaugh’s first assignments at DOGE was to re-interview engineering, product management and design employees at GSA. Those conducting the meetings sometimes refused to identify themselves, Government Executive previously reported. DOGE also re-interviewed existing employees elsewhere.
“I believe my inputs on the interviews with employees were then provided to the head of GSA when eventual RIF plans were conducted at GSA,” said Cavanaugh during his deposition.
DOGE’s approach to assessing career employees appeared to flout federal statute and procedure. At NEH, Cavanaugh said that DOGE team members gained system administrator access that allowed them to view details about how employees were using their emails. It also enabled them to make changes without input from the agency’s head of technology.
Such email access was used “mostly in the context of conducting RIF plans,” he said, adding that he and his colleagues were monitoring employees’ email usage and levels of engagement.
Under federal law, agencies can use four factors for determining who gets laid off: the tenure of the employee — e.g. whether the individual is a permanent staffer or a temporary one — their veteran status, their length of service and their performance rating. The latter evaluation is determined through a set process involving the employee's supervisor. RIF statute does not provide for a process that would require employees to interview to justify their jobs, nor does it allow for the monitoring of employee account activity.
NEH ultimately laid off two-thirds of its staff, while GSA sent RIF notices to large portions of its human resources, IT and public buildings teams.
DOGE pushed for high-level access to systems at other agencies, too, another move outside of typical government procedure.
The approach was “part of our operating procedure” for DOGE, “discussed openly during all-hands meetings,” Cavanaugh said during his deposition. It “allowed us to operate as if we were an administrator within the agency for provisioning email accounts, access to critical systems, etc.”
This push for administrative access circumvents many of the cybersecurity policies followed by government agencies, where employees typically only have access to the systems they need to perform their work.
Having more employees with direct access to normally walled-off systems can increase the risk of data breaches, widen the attack surface for hackers and create insider threat risks. Whistleblowers have accused DOGE employees of exfiltrating sensitive data using secretive methods, planning to take sensitive government data with them to private employers and more at other government agencies.
DOGE makes its move
At NEH, more than 1,000 grantees received emails on April 2 from a Microsoft email account—not an NEH email—set up by DOGE, cancelling their grants. It was a “day of chaos,” one person familiar with DOGE’s time at NEH told Government Executive, as staff didn’t know what grants were being cancelled, or even that they were being cancelled that day at all.
NEH employees found out about grant cancellations when they began receiving emails from confused grantees wanting to know if the email was legitimate, they said. Some thought it was a phishing email. Employees themselves could not initially confirm the authenticity of the cancellations, as the notices had been sent by DOGE outside of official channels.
The next day, the agency put most of its staff on administrative leave. As with grantees, they also received this news from an external email address, “NEH_HR@nehemail.onmicrosoft.com.” A week after that, staff began receiving reduction-in-force notices.
NEH staffing has gone from 215 employees in 2024 to 57 as of January—about 75%—according to government data, and it has reorganized from seven divisions down to four.
The largest staffing cuts were to the program officers at NEH, humanities experts with advanced degrees hired to run peer review panels, read application drafts for potential grantees and more, according to the person familiar.
Adam Wolfson, a top NEH official who previously served as its acting director, said in his own deposition that DOGE called the shots on the layoffs.
“I believe they were the ones who said ‘you need to reduce by a certain amount,’” Wolfson said.
Since last spring, NEH has awarded handpicked projects that promote traditionalism and Western civilization, the New York Times has reported. Typically, the agency awards grants through a competitive process, though it now maintains a fraction of its previous capacity to do so.
‘Make decisions and act quickly’
In his testimony, McDonald said he made the final call on which grants to cancel, though he conceded he was following DOGE’s lead.
McDonald said Cavanaugh and Fox “instructed” him to cancel certain grants on a specific timeframe, and he did not feel like he could “disobey.”
“Either way, as you've made clear, it's your decision on whether to discontinue funding on any of the projects on this list,” McDonald said in an email about grants cancellations to the pair at the time.
Cavanaugh said that “the general pacing of DOGE was to try and make decisions and act quickly to avoid government employees dragging their feet on cancellations.”
McDonald noted that Fox directed him to identify a “core” team of employees who would not stand in DOGE’s way as it was executing its plans. The DOGE officials entered NEH with significant skepticism toward the career workforce, McDonald said, despite there being “no factual basis for [them] to believe that.”
That is why DOGE employees insisted on sending out the grant cancellation notices themselves, despite NEH maintaining its own process for doing so.
“The DOGE team was concerned about the degree of cooperation that they would get from the NEH staff,” McDonald said. “Therefore, they preferred to do it, to use their own process for doing it, to avoid the possibility that staff that was opposed to what we were doing would seek in some way to impede it.”
Wolfson agreed with McDonald that there was no cause for DOGE's paranoia.
“I'm a civil servant,” Wolfson said in his own deposition. “I try to be neutral and to assist the leadership of the agency in accomplishing what they want to accomplish.”
Asked whether he could have pushed back on DOGE’s aggressive tactics, McDonald—who is now under consideration to be the permanent nominee to lead NEH—demurred, noting the question was no longer relevant.
“We're going down a hypothetical road about what would have ensued if I had done that,” he said, “which we'll never know.”
Although troves of relevant emails have been made public as part of the lawsuit, some of the records of DOGE’s work at the agency won’t ever be available. Cavanaugh and Fox both said that they used the end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal and its autodelete feature extensively to communicate during their time in DOGE.
Fox said that Armstrong told him to download the app when he first approached him about DOGE.
“I remember him being very focused on switching to Signal to talk about anything,” said Fox.
DOGE adopted a records retention policy in late March telling staffers to preserve messages on Signal and on personal devices in compliance with the Presidential Records Act—and to turn off the app’s auto-delete feature—in the wake of the Signal scandal at the Pentagon.
But Cavanaugh appears to have continued using Signal, and he switched between his personal and government devices interchangeably for official agency work. He said that he sent Davis a spreadsheet of cancelled grants and contracts weekly via Signal, at Davis’ request.
Asked who else he communicated with at DOGE via Signal, Cavanaugh said, “it’d be a pretty long list.”
He and Fox left DOGE in August and September, respectively, and have been working at a company they co-founded.
Both testified during their depositions that they joined DOGE because they were eager to decrease the federal deficit, although Fox admitted it wasn’t an interest of his until Armstrong reached out to him.
“Did you reduce the federal deficit?” a lawyer asked Cavanaugh.
“No, we didn’t,” he replied.
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