Deposition Exposes DOGE Bros Can’t Even Define DEI
Deposition videos released by the American Historical Association against former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees made rounds online. For a bunch of appointed personnel, it didn’t seem like they had an understanding of the budgets they wanted to slash.
“How do you interpret DEI?” Justin Fox, a former DOGE staffer, was asked on record. A long sigh later, he responded, “There was the EO—explicitly laid out the details.” “That’s okay. I’m asking for your understanding of it.” “My understanding was what exactly was written in the EO,” Fox reasserted. He followed up and claimed he doesn’t remember the details.
“So, right now, do you have an understanding of what DEI is?” the interviewer proceeded with the next question. “Anytime we would look at a grant through the lens of complying with an executive order. We would just refer back to the EO and assess if this grant had any relation to it.” Fox, for the third time, said that his understanding aligns with that of the EO. Which executive order was Fox referring to? It’s unclear based on the footage, as he did not give any direct reference to it.
It’s DEI because he says so
“Why is a documentary about Holocaust survivors DEI?” the interviewer continued. Fox could still not respond with his own definition of DEI. “It’s the gender-based story that’s inherently discriminatory to focus on this specific group.” “It’s inherently discriminatory to focus on what specific group?” the interviewer clarified.
“So, females during the Holocaust,” Fox responded, in a way that would perhaps have Anne Frank rolling in her grave. When asked how the story of the Holocaust is “inherently discriminatory,” Fox barely strings the answer together.
“It’s focusing on DEI principles, gender being one of them,” he argued that the story of the Holocaust amplified “marginalized voices of the females” in Jewish cultures. But he contradictorily disagreed that a documentary about women is not inherently DEI.
DEI for Musk’s minions
“You don’t regret that people might have lost important income?” the interviewer asked another former DOGE employee, Nathan Cavanaugh. He was in charge of overseeing small US agencies and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants. “No, I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from two trillion to close to zero,” he replied. The interviewer asked if Cavanaugh was successful in that task.
Unironically and appallingly, Cavanaugh said, “No, we didn’t.” A rejected grant proposal was read out, and Cavanaugh was asked why he and Fox thought of it as the “craziest.” It was a book about how activists fought the convergence of HIV/AIDS and incarceration from inside and outside prisons across the Reagan and the Clinton years.
Cavanaugh says of this research proposal, “Because it references feminist and queer insights into prison abolition and LGBTQ studies.” Translation: This is gay, so it’s not worth studying. Cavanaugh said no, “I think a person can have enough judgment from reading books and being well-informed outside of traditional experience to make judgment calls about the obvious things like a grant that literally lists DEI in its description to know whether or not it violates an executive order.”
Despite mentioning ‘books’ and being ‘well-informed,’ Cavanaugh clarified that he didn’t read books on the matter. He also does not have a history in scholarly peer review.
A dance of arrogance and ignorance
It’s downright concerning that these men who appear utterly unqualified were left in charge to oversee sensitive government data and cut funding on a whim simply because they’re biased against a subject matter. Saying a topic is too gay to pursue doesn’t make them sound intelligent—it shows that they can’t objectively see the merit of a topic because they obsess over labels.
It’s a grave irony that Cavanaugh didn’t have the academic qualifications to understand scholarly literature. Was this not the principle behind DOGE? Merit handed to the wrong people is an injustice to those who had to put in work to earn their place. And yet, both Cavanaugh and Fox face the deposition as the so-called ‘DEI’ hires they fear—unqualified, inexperienced, and full of hot air.
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