Justin Fox testifies in the Authors Guild vs. NEH lawsuit about his role in Elon Musk's "Doge" team, which used Signal and ChatGPT to flag hundreds of millions in DEI grants for termination under Executive Orders 14151 and 14168. Fox admits personally sending cancellation notices for projects like LGBTQ travel guides while refusing to address AI bias concerns, claiming funds were redirected to food stamps despite admitting uncertainty about the actual deficit reduction. Ultimately, the deposition reveals a systematic, top-down purge of humanities funding driven by ideological alignment rather than merit, fundamentally altering federal support for the arts and humanities. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time
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Deposition Record Begins00:01:54
We are now on the record.
The time is 9:59 a.m. on January 28, 2026.
Audio and video recording will continue to take place until all parties agree off the record.
Please note that microphones are sensitive and they pick up whispering in private conversations.
This is the video recorded deposition of Justin Fox in a matter of the author's guilt at all, plaintiffs versus National Endowment for the Humanities at all, defendants.
This deposition is being held at Schindler, Coleman, and Hawkman, LLP, New York, New York.
My name is Christian Don.
I'm a legal video specialist.
Certified sonar versus Patricia D. Donnelly on behalf of Lexitas.
Counsel state their opinions for the record, and all those appearing involved be noted for the record in the certified scenario swearing witness.
Piinka Aniemi from Fairmark Partners on behalf of the authors guild plaintiffs et al.
I'd love to know the Jacobin lawyer on behalf of the last answer Rachel Dowd from the U.S. Attorney's Office on behalf of the defendants.
Do you swear or affirm that the testimony you're about to be able to be the truth, tell the truth, and the divine truth?
Yes.
Do you want to put it on me?
Yes, perfect.
Is that good?
Yeah.
Good morning, Justin.
Morning.
How are you doing?
Good.
Have you ever testified under oath before?
No.
Do you understand the oath you just took has the same force and effect of an oath taken in a court of law?
Yes.
Great.
Oath and Document Review00:10:21
And you understand it requires you to tell the truth during this deposition?
Yes.
You understand that not telling the truth during this deposition could expose you to criminal perjury charges?
Yes.
So during this deposition, it's important that if you don't understand a question I'm asking, to tell me that.
Otherwise, I'll assume you understood it when you answered.
Understood?
Yeah.
Great.
Is there anything today keeping you from testifying accurately or thinking clearly?
No.
No alcohol?
No?
No.
Okay.
And also verbal responses would be great just so the snographer can record them.
Yep.
Great.
Any other mind-altering substances?
No.
Okay.
What's your full legal name?
Are you represented by any counsel today?
Not outside counsel, no.
Not outside counsel?
Yeah.
DOJ with Rachel.
Okay.
Is it your understanding that Ms. Dowd represents you?
I'm not sure.
Okay.
What's your understanding of your relationship with Ms. Dowd?
She's representing DOJ and assisting me with the deposition today.
Okay, great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So when you say assisting you, I'll ask some questions about that.
Have you met with Ms. Dowd before today?
Okay.
When was that?
Yesterday.
Okay.
Any time besides that?
Not in person, but a few phone calls.
Okay.
I'll ask about the phone calls in a second, but yesterday you said you met with her.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
And of course she might speak up and mention that there's some privilege concerns, so I'd advise you to obviously listen to her representations.
But how long did you two meet yesterday?
Four hours.
Okay.
And where was that?
Chambers Street, 86 Chambers Street at their offices.
Okay.
Was anyone else in that meeting?
For the entirety, no.
I met Mary Ellen and one other lady.
Okay.
Do you remember the other one's name?
I don't.
Okay.
And you said that was around four hours.
Great.
Did you review any documents during that meeting?
Okay.
Did those documents help to refresh your recollection?
They helped.
They helped.
Okay.
What kinds of documents did you review?
Emails, communication mostly.
Sorry, could you give me some more color there?
Emails about emails about NEH.
Okay.
My relationship with Mike, sort of timeline procedurally our interaction with Mike and NEH, and by our I mean Nate and myself.
Okay.
So Nate, documents kind of showing communications between you, Nate Kavanaugh, Mike McDonald's, and others during your time at NEH?
Yes.
Okay.
Did you see any spreadsheets yesterday?
Yes.
Okay.
Could you describe generally what those spreadsheets were?
Coordinating feedback on grants primarily, if not exclusively.
Okay.
And those were NEH grants.
Okay.
Have you talked to anyone besides Rachel, Mary Ellen, and the other attorney about this deposition?
No.
Okay.
And I want to make a distinction.
I asked how you prepared with them.
Now I'm asking if you've talked about it generally with anyone.
I told my mom this morning.
And I know Nate got deposed or was here last Friday.
That's the extent of that.
How do you know Nate was here last Friday?
We worked together.
And he was out of, he was held up here for the day.
How do you know he was here?
I mean, we worked together, so he said he got deposed.
in the same case yeah I'm just so yeah not every time someone doesn't show up to work it means they're being deposed Yeah, yeah.
How did he tell you that he was being deposed?
I don't remember, honestly.
Did he tell you in person?
Yeah.
Okay.
Did you text about it?
No.
Did you communicate about it via any mediums, Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram?
No, we work together, so we're in person every day.
Okay.
Do you remember what he said in person to you?
No, something close to I'm getting deposed.
Okay.
Yeah.
Sorry, these are pro formal questions.
So.
What do you mean by pro forma questions?
I just mean that these are questions that are kind of are usually asked in the deposition.
Exactly.
So I'm just saying I'm not trying to be invasive.
I'm just asking you about that.
So do you remember generally when that was?
No.
Okay.
Have you talked to him since Friday?
Yeah.
Okay.
Did you talk to him about his deposition on Friday?
No.
Do you have any engagement letter or any formal agreement with Ms. Dowd or any other attorneys that you've met with?
Not that I'm aware of.
Okay.
So I assume you're aware that you helped to gather documents in relation to this case, is that right?
Objection.
You can answer.
I don't know, honestly.
Did you, I guess, let me ask the question straightforward.
Yeah.
Did you gather any documents for this case?
Objection.
You can still answer the question.
Personally?
Yes.
So did I gather documents for the binder that you guys have and we're going to be walking through?
That's the question.
I'm asking whether you've engaged in any searches and the gathering of documents for production in this lawsuit?
No.
I don't have my laptop and all of my equipment is turned in.
No longer an employee in the government, so I don't have access to anything.
Okay.
So dating back to the commencement of this lawsuit, you never engaged in the search for documents related to this case?
Not that I'm aware of.
Okay.
Did you search anything on your personal phone, for instance, in relation to this case?
I didn't need to.
Did you search anything on your laptop or laptops in relation to this case?
I don't have access to my laptops anymore.
Okay.
And when you say your laptops, you mean what do you mean?
NEH and GSA.
Laptops.
Do you have a personal laptop?
Yeah.
Would those, would that laptop have ever stored documents related to your time at NEH?
Okay.
So you turned over, or excuse me, you gave back your work phone after leaving NEH?
Approximately when was.
Yeah, sorry.
Sorry.
Go ahead.
That's it, yes.
And I just wanted to verbally respond if you said that.
I appreciate that.
Yeah.
And you turned over your work laptop as well upon leaving?
Yes.
Did you ever use your personal phone to do any work or talk about any of your work related to NEH?
Related to NEH work?
No.
What about related to any of your work with any Doge teams or GSA?
Coordinating locations and meeting in person, yes.
Okay.
But you never searched that phone for communications related to this case?
There was nothing on my personal.
I had experience previously in finance.
Everything needed to be kept on a separate phone.
All of the tangible work-related communications were done over my GSA.
Okay.
So you didn't turn over any documents, any communications in relation to this case?
There was nothing on there.
Okay.
Did anyone ask you to do that?
Sorry?
I don't remember.
You don't remember if anyone asked you to turn over documents and communications?
Exactly.
Did Ms. Dowd ask you to turn over any communications or documents in relation to this case?
I remember her asking if I had documents to turn over, of which I have nothing.
Tab 1A Exhibit Presentation00:04:44
Okay.
And you told her no?
I have nothing.
Okay.
Did you search when she asked you that question?
I don't have anything on my personal because I never use my personal for.
Okay.
I understand.
I forget his name.
Jacob, are you still there?
Yes.
Great.
If you could pull up tab 1A for presentation.
Is this exhibit 1 or is it 1A?
It's exhibit 1.
It's called tab 1A in the folder.
And we'll call this Fox Exhibit 1.
The text is a little small.
Can you see that?
I think Jacob could probably figure it out.
It's on this screen.
Yeah.
I see it up there.
It's a bigger on his screen.
It's on this screen.
It's okay.
I think if he just zooms in, we'll be okay.
Can you guys see it?
No.
Yeah, for the most part.
Okay.
I think we could probably do a few more clicks on the plus and then we'll be perfect.
Nice, there we go.
I think that's okay.
We can see, man.
We appreciate it.
All right.
Can you see that?
Yeah.
Okay.
Can you read the text?
That's what's important.
Yes.
Yes?
Okay.
Have you seen this document before?
I can scroll through if you'd like to see more of it.
There are several pages.
Yeah, I don't know.
Okay.
Honestly.
Jacob, could you like toggle downwards a little bit and just kind of show some more pages of the document for the witness?
You can keep going faster than that.
There are a lot of pages.
Does this look familiar?
Yeah, I think so.
Okay.
So you can, would you say that you've seen this document before?
Okay.
Yes.
Okay.
Who showed you this document?
Rachel had sent it to me.
Okay.
Okay.
You can stop there, Jacob.
Thank you.
Okay.
So if you could go up, Jacob, just to maybe scroll up a little bit.
What is exhibit A?
It said if you scroll down, it says see attach exhibit A. Is that right here?
Okay.
Yeah.
You can stop there, Jacob.
Thanks.
That's good.
Okay.
So yeah, if you were to scroll down a little bit more, Jacob, we're going to go to page three at a bottle.
Or actually, keep going.
I think maybe page four.
Great.
Okay.
So you can stop there.
Instructions?
Great.
So you see this instructions section.
Search Requests Eight Through Ten00:09:10
Have you seen this before?
Yes.
Okay.
And if you could keep scrolling down, Jacob, to the part.
just scroll down and I'll tell you when to stop.
Okay, relevant time period right here.
All right, so this says relevant time period, unless otherwise noted in the body of a request, the relevant time period for these requests is November 1, 2024 through the present.
These requests seek all responsive documents created or generated during the relevant time period, as well as responsive documents created or generated outside the relevant time period, but which contain information concerning the relevant time period.
So when Ms. Dowd asks you to search for documents and communications related to your time at NEH, did you search documents and communications dating back to November 1, 2024?
Objection.
I didn't have any government laptop or computer, and there was nothing on my personal.
Okay.
How do you know there was nothing on your personal?
Did you look?
I never used it.
Okay.
You noted earlier that you spoke with some of your Doge and GSA colleagues via your personal phone.
Did you search those communications for relevant information?
There's nothing on my personal related to NEH communication.
I had no need to search my personal.
Okay.
How do you know there was nothing on your personal related to NEH?
I never used it for NEH purposes.
Okay.
But you used it for Doge purposes?
For coordinating where people were, meeting in person, yes.
Okay.
So we're going to run through the request for production really quickly.
So can you see that there's the first bullet there?
It says all documents and communications relating to your deployment to NEH and any assignments or instructions given to you relating to your work at NEH.
Do you see that?
Okay.
Is it your testimony that you don't have any documents in your possession that are responsive to subject number one?
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.
You can scroll down, Jacob.
To just, yeah, so two is at the top.
Thanks.
Okay.
This is asking for documents related to the mass terminations and respect with respect to NEH.
None of those communications on your phone or laptop?
Could you repeat the question?
I can change the question.
Did you do anything to search for anything related to these subjects under number two in particular?
I had no need of two.
Okay.
Let's go down to number three, Jacob.
So number three and four, those are both with respect to any age.
Did you do anything to search for those documents?
Number three.
And number four, there was no work I was doing with any age on my personal.
That's okay.
Number six was about Doge.
Did you do anything to search for any documents related to request number six?
The mass termination.
I presume this is NEH.
Is that right?
It says termination.
Yep.
All of that communication was done via my GSA laptop, the phone.
Okay, thanks.
If you could slowly scroll down, Jacob, just to the end, I think the last one is number 10, request number 10.
Okay.
And is it fair to say, looking at this, and given that NEH is listed in 8, 9, and 10, that your response to those would be the same as the prior responses with respect to your communications and searching for them?
Objection.
Could I clarify when Rachel says objection?
You still answer unless, yeah, you generally still answer.
Okay.
So you can, that's for the record.
So just allow a little bit of time for me to object, but then you just answer.
Could you repeat the question?
Did you do anything to search for documents or communications responsive to requests number 8, 9, and 10?
Okay, one more time.
I'm sorry, I've just read through those bullets.
Could you repeat the question?
Did you undergo any efforts to identify, gather, or produce documents that would have been responsive to requests 8, 9, and 10?
My personal phone was used for no NEH communication work.
Okay.
Signal Communications History00:04:56
I want to talk a little bit about the extent of your conversations with Doge people on your personal phone.
Who would you have been communicating with on your personal phone at Doge or GSA?
Nate, the team members on my team, Ethan Chowtran, Justin Imanetti, a few others.
Michael McDonald?
No.
Did you ever call him from your personal phone?
No.
Never text him from your personal phone?
No.
Okay.
Do you remember when you were given a government phone, a work phone?
My first day.
Okay.
Before your first day, were you in touch with anyone from Doge or the government?
Yeah.
How did you communicate with them before you got your government phone?
Signal?
Anything else?
No?
Okay.
And who was it that you were communicating with before you were issued a government phone?
Anthony Armstrong, Josh Gruenbaum, Nate Kavanaugh.
Anyone else?
Ethan Shopper.
Who were the first two people?
Anthony Armstrong.
Who's that?
One of the leadership within Doge that I initially communicated with.
Okay.
And who's the second name?
Josh Gruenbaum.
Okay.
Who's that?
Head of Federal Acquisition Services for GSA.
Okay.
Thank you.
And you said you were communicating with them via Signal?
Signal.
Okay.
And nothing else besides Signal.
Great.
Was that a group chat or were they individual communications with each one of them?
Some group chat, some individual.
Okay.
And then, once you were hired by the government, did you migrate all of those communications to your government phone?
With those individuals?
No.
Okay.
So you were still communicating with Nate Kavanaugh, Ethan Shabtran, and the other two on your personal phone after being hired.
Is that right?
Yes.
Okay.
And did you do anything to search those communications in response to any of those requests that we've gone through from your subpoena?
They are all deleted automatically.
That's the default setting in Signal.
And you don't think that you ever spoke to them on any service beyond Signal, including Nate, for instance?
No.
Okay.
The Signal platform, can you tell me a little bit about it?
You mentioned auto-delete.
Can you explain what you mean?
Objection.
It's a messaging and calling platform that everybody was using that I downloaded to communicate with Nate, Josh, Anthony.
Okay.
Did you download it specifically to communicate with those people?
How did they tell you to download Signal?
Download Signal and call me there.
Okay.
But did they tell you that in person?
Anthony Armstrong, I had, he was a mentor of mine.
And he said, download Signal.
I want to talk to you about potentially joining.
So all of our communications were on Signal.
Okay.
How did Mr. Armstrong tell you that?
In person.
In person.
Okay.
Were you sharing text messages with Mr. Armstrong before you downloaded Signal?
Yes.
Okay.
Ever about Doge?
No.
Did you search those texts to come to the understanding that you never texted him about Doge?
I remember him being very Focused on switching to signal to talk about anything.
Understanding Complaint Allegations00:03:43
Okay.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
So stepping back from all these communications, and we could pull down exhibit one.
Thank you, Jacob.
Did you bring any documents with you today to the deposition?
No.
Okay.
When did you first become aware of this lawsuit?
At some point in government.
I don't remember when exactly.
Okay.
Do you remember how you became aware of it?
I think a letter came addressed to me and Nate.
Okay.
I don't remember when, but it was printed out in physical form.
Okay, great.
And was that sent to you?
You said while you were in government, I think.
You were still working for the government when you received that.
Which one?
Sorry, when you received the complain, when you learned, I presume through the complaint that there was a lawsuit that had your name on it.
Exaction.
Yes.
Okay.
Cool.
Have you read the complaint?
Yes.
Okay.
Do you understand the nature of the allegations in the complaint?
I think so.
What's your understanding of the allegation?
I honestly could not articulate.
There are a few, so you'd have to be specific about which one.
Yeah.
So let's start with the author's guild complaint.
Okay.
Are you aware of that complaint?
I'm aware of it, yeah.
Okay.
Do you understand the nature of the allegations in it?
Jackson not not to the level that you might but yes for the most part Okay.
Could you describe your understanding of those allegations?
And I'm just going to caution that if your understanding is informed by things that attorneys told you, be aware of that and to not reveal privileged locations.
Okay.
But otherwise, you can answer.
Could you repeat the question?
Do you mind reading back the question for the witness?
Question.
Could you describe your understanding of those allegations?
Grants were terminated by Michael at the same time we were working with him.
And Authors Guild disagrees with the method and reason these grants were terminated.
Pre-Bonus Salary Discussion00:05:31
And they want to learn more about the process, and that's my understanding.
Okay, thank you.
Is that your understanding of the nature of the ACLS complaint as well?
That would be my understanding.
Okay, thanks.
Are you currently employed?
Yes.
Who's your employer?
A company that Nate and I started.
What's it called?
Special.
Special.
Since when have you been at Special?
October 1st.
2025?
2025.
Okay.
And you said you and Nate started it, is that right?
Yes.
So are you like a co-founder of the company?
Yes.
What's your role within the company?
Co-founder.
What do you do as the co-founder?
Anything that needs to be done.
It's hard to.
It's okay.
I'll ask more pointed questions.
What's the nature of the service that Special provides?
We are buying 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.
Okay.
And sorry, when did you say that you started there?
October 2025?
Is that right?
Yes.
And where were you employed prior to that?
GSA.
GSA.
When did you start at GSA?
March 3rd, I believe.
That's 2025?
2025.
And how long did you stay at GSA?
Sorry, strike that.
A better question.
Just when did you leave GSA?
Mid-September.
2025?
Yes.
So give or take six months at GSA?
Yes.
Okay.
What was your job title, official title at GSA?
Senior Advisor to Stephen Ahiken.
To who?
Stephen Ahikian, head of GSA at the time.
Okay, got it.
Okay, we'll come back to that.
And before March 3rd, 2025, where were you employed?
Financial firm in Los Angeles.
Okay.
Was that Nexus Capital?
That's right.
That's a private equity firm?
Yes.
And that was based in Los Angeles?
Yes.
What was your title there?
Associate.
Okay.
And when did you leave Nexus?
The end of September, the Friday before I started at GSA.
Okay, so left on Friday, joined GSA Monday.
Is that fair to say?
Honestly, I'm not too familiar with how private equity works.
Are there groups, specialties within private equity?
Were you doing anything in particular?
Sometimes there are groups.
I was generalist, meaning no specific group.
And roughly, what was your income at Nexus Capital?
I don't remember.
Good ballpark.
$130,000?
Okay.
Is that pre-bonus?
Pre-bonus.
Okay.
And then with the bonus, generally, what would be added to that?
Anywhere from zero to 100.
Okay.
And before then, you were an investment banking analyst at Jeffreys, is that right?
Yes.
Okay.
Sorry, when did you start at Nexus?
Do you remember that?
Joining Government Opportunities00:08:28
2023?
Okay.
And before that, you were at Jeffries?
Yes.
Okay.
And I'm skipping back to GSA very quickly.
Do you remember your salary at GSA?
150.
Okay.
So you were making more in base rate for GSA than you were for your private equity firm?
I believe so.
Okay.
Great, thank you.
You attended University of Virginia, right?
Yes.
Okay.
When did you graduate from there?
2020.
2020.
What was your major commerce?
Do you have any minors while you were at UVA?
German.
German, okay.
Commerce, major, German, minor.
Great.
And graduated in 2020.
Did you belong to any clubs at UVA?
Yeah.
Which ones?
An investment club?
A community service club called Lions Club?
TEDx Club?
TEN X. TEDx, like TED Talks.
Yeah, I think that was it.
Great.
Any clubs or organizations outside of UVA that you were a part of while you were studying there?
No.
Okay.
Any internships while you were there?
Was one with Jeffries?
No.
Okay.
Can you briefly tell us where you interned while you were at UVA?
In Arlington.
Doing wealth management at Morgan Stanley.
And then in Atlanta at VRA Partners.
Okay.
And then full-time started at Jeffries.
Okay, great.
Do you have any graduate degrees?
No.
Okay.
And no PhDs, doctorates, anything like that?
No.
Okay.
Before joining the government in, I think, March of 2025, did you have any experience in government?
No.
Okay.
Were you ever part of any political campaigns?
No.
Did you ever engage in any public grant administration before you joined government?
No.
private grant administration?
No.
Had you ever engaged in anything that required you to review scholarship for scholarly merit before you joined the government?
I can't remember.
There may have been a few scholarship grants that we awarded at, for example, TEDx.
Did you ever review any humanities projects for scholarly merit prior to joining the government?
No.
Okay.
Did you ever have any relation or involvement with the National Endowment for the Humanities before joining government in March of 2025?
No.
Okay.
Were you familiar with the NEH before you joined the government?
No.
Were you familiar with the Administrative Procedures Act before you joined the government?
No.
So let's switch gears to the process of you joining the government.
You noted that you had a conversation with someone that you knew.
Could you remind me that name?
Anthony Armstrong.
Anthony Armstrong.
And you testified that Anthony Armstrong told you to download Signal.
Is that right?
Yes.
And that was to discuss an opportunity in joining the government?
Is that right?
Yes.
Okay.
Prior to that, had you had any conversations with anyone about joining the government?
No.
Okay.
How did you know Anthony Armstrong?
He's the father of one of my friends.
Okay.
We worked in the same field.
He was the mentor to me.
What field is that?
Investment banking.
Okay.
Did you work with him, actually?
No.
Where did he work?
Morgan Stanley.
Okay.
And so he told you to download Signal and why did he tell you to download Signal?
Strike that, sorry.
Do you have an understanding of why he asked you to download Signal?
No.
Okay.
But he asked you to download Signal to communicate about government work.
Right.
Jackson.
About an opportunity for me to join the government, yes.
Okay.
And can you describe what that opportunity was?
They were recruiting hardworking individuals to join GSA and find government efficiencies.
My background suited well.
Move as soon as you can.
That was the scope of it.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Did he tell you anything else in those conversations?
About the nature of the role?
Just that it was going to be a lot of really hard work.
And that was he honestly was not sure where I would go, but to talk with Josh Gurnbaum, see if there's a fit with his team.
And that was when I spoke with Josh.
But no, otherwise, nature of the work now.
Okay.
Do you have any understanding of how Mr. Armstrong knew Mr. Gernbaum?
Pressing Spending Deficit Issue00:02:18
No.
Okay.
How did he put you in touch with him?
Signal.
Okay.
Through like a group chat or something?
Yes.
Okay.
How did you feel being reached out to about joining the government while you were at Nexus Capital?
Interested?
Okay.
What made you interested in that?
I hated private equity.
Fair enough.
Anything else?
An opportunity to work with other hardworking people and address the spending deficit.
Was that something that you were particularly interested in, the spending deficit?
Not until Anthony reached out had I then I dug into it really.
And yes, it seemed like a very pressing issue.
What made you feel like it was a pressing issue?
Or strike that?
Part of you digging in, while you were digging in, what did you see that made you think that it was a pressing issue?
A spending deficit of $2 trillion.
Part of that is related to government spending in excess of the income that it's generating.
And government spend has done nothing but go up to the right And it's the most controllable piece of the equation, in my opinion, of the spending deficit.
And the group that was being recruited for this was meant to address that problem.
And I felt compelled to help.
Building Recruitment Conversations00:15:32
Okay.
Do you feel that you succeeded looking back now in achieving that goal?
In some ways, yes.
Did the deficit go down during your tenure at the government?
In other ways, no.
I think having somebody check to see where taxpayer dollars were going that was an unbiased third-party auditor of common sense approach to spending has never happened before in the history of the government.
And now we've established that it's possible.
I do feel it was a success in the sense that people will be more understanding that these aren't just numbers on a page, that they add up into something that's bigger than what they're working on.
And I think that in that way it was successful.
Yeah.
So we'll review some of the methods that your team used to attempt to reduce the deficit later in the deposition.
But for now, let's stick on kind of how you joined GSA and how you got involved with Doge.
So Mr. Armstrong reached out, and this was specifically about the GSA.
Is that right?
Traction.
I don't remember.
Did he mention Doge at any point during these conversations?
Yes.
What did he say about Doge?
A group of people being onboarded into agencies to partner with leaders and find efficiencies.
Okay.
And how did you understand the relationship between GSA and Doge while you were in these conversations with Mr. Armstrong?
It didn't give it much thought.
Understandable.
So you were still a Nexus and looking at government, and it all kind of blended together.
Is that fair to say?
Jackson.
No, I'd known about the distinct parts of government.
I knew that GSA was the closest to a business side focused on contracts and government services.
Yeah.
Okay.
And so after Mr. Armstrong introduced you to Mr. Gernbaum, did you continue communicating with Mr. Armstrong about GSA and DOGE issues?
No, not about GSA.
Okay.
Josh connected me with the White House liaison for GSA that I'm blanking on a name for.
Ryan Leppard.
Ryan Leopard.
Yes.
Okay.
So at this point, Mr. Armstrong was your first point of contact into the government.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Okay, then he introduced you to Mr. Gernbaum.
And Mr. Gernbaum introduced you to Mr. Ryan Leppard.
Yes.
Okay.
Was there anyone else at the time that you were talking to about government work?
Not that I can remember.
Okay.
Did you learn anything from Mr. Gernbaum that Mr. Armstrong hadn't told you?
Yes, about Federal Acquisition Services, but I'm also remembering that Mike, the head of GSA Buildings, I also spoke with.
And I forget his last name, but I think he's still the head of GSA Buildings, but that was another short conversation.
Who's this person?
Mike is the head of buildings at GSA.
Okay.
And forgive me, I don't remember his last name.
How are you communicating with Mike?
Again, another group chat in Signal.
Okay.
After that, Ryan Leppert began my onboarding forms.
Okay.
So.
And Ryan was over email.
Over email.
Yes.
Okay.
So that was not over Signal?
Yes.
Did you do anything to search for those communications in preparation for this litigation?
Yes.
Although none related into my NEH work.
Okay.
So just so I understand, you were looking at your emails and making a call on your own about what related and what didn't relate to the nature of the litigation.
Jackson.
Could you repeat it?
I could ask it differently.
How were you assessing what was responsive to what was being requested in this litigation?
NEH-related directions and sort of what brought me to NEH in the first place and the scope of that as opposed to GSA.
Okay.
So who's Mr. Who's Josh?
Josh Gurnbaum.
GSA is head of Federal Acquisition Services.
Okay.
He's one of the lead guys at GSA, I think, still.
Okay.
Did you have any formal conversations and interviews?
Strike that actually.
Did you formally interview for your role with GSA?
I don't remember.
The answer is I don't remember.
There were others in GSA, security and background check individuals.
Yeah, I don't remember.
I'm sorry, this was less than a year ago.
You don't remember if you had any interviews to start working in government?
I don't remember specifically.
I couldn't give you exactly one interview.
Okay.
You can give me many.
Who are the people that you talked to in the run-up to being hired by GSA?
Ryan Leppert.
Who else?
I don't remember the names.
But you talked to other people.
I don't remember exactly.
There were so many conversations going on then that some of them may have been GSA.
Some of them may have been affiliates of other agencies.
Like Doge, for example, like Doge.
Okay.
But there was many conversations.
A lot of onboarding, a lot of background checks.
Okay.
So let's just take a step back then.
It sounds like what you're describing is kind of chaotic.
There were a lot of background checks, lots of interviews.
That's what you're describing?
Fraction.
you can answer.
I mean, it was chaotic, personally.
I was leaving my existing job.
I may be conflating the conversations, like the chaos that was ensuing from moving across the country.
Right.
I don't remember, is the honest answer.
Okay.
It's been a year and range now.
Right.
So, well, not a full year yet.
A year.
Okay.
So, I'm sorry.
I just need to gather some names.
So, Anthony Armstrong, Josh Gurnbaum, Ryan Leopard.
You mentioned earlier that you might have had conversations via Signal with Nate Kavanaugh, for instance.
Were you in conversations with him before joining?
Rejection.
before joining GSA on March 3rd.
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
And I'm sorry if you said this already.
Do you remember when Mr. Armstrong actually reached out to you and asked you to move on to Signal?
Some point in January.
In January, okay.
Yeah.
Was this before the inauguration?
On January 21st?
Shortly thereafter, if not on Jan 20.
Okay.
So he reached out to you on January, well, not reached out, but asked you to move on to Signal on January 20 or thereabouts.
You ended up officially joining GSA in March.
Talk to me about the time in between.
What was going on?
Projection.
I was still working at my existing job and had a few conversations with the folks that I'd already mentioned, Anthony Armstrong.
Josh Gruenbaum, Mike Sullivan, I believe is the name of the head of buildings for GSA.
Okay.
All of them were looking for hard-working individuals.
I was still working my existing job.
So it was just a lot going on.
Okay.
And would you have been communicating with all of these individuals with the exception of Ryan Leppard via Signal?
Exclusively?
Yes.
Okay.
Is there any possibility you spoke with any of them off of Signal?
Possibility.
I have Anthony's personal number, but we only spoke on Signal.
Okay.
Did you meet anyone that might have been a higher-up at Doge in the lead up to being hired by GSA?
that I can remember.
Not that I can remember.
Those guys work leadership.
Right.
Okay.
So did you ever, so upon starting at GSA, what did you understand your role was going to be with government?
So upon starting at GSA, what did you understand your role was going to be with government?
Nate, with whatever he was working on.
Okay.
And that's Nate Kavanaugh?
Yes.
Okay.
Who told you that would be your role with the government?
Anthony Armstrong?
Anyone else?
Not that I can remember.
Okay.
Did you meet Steve Davis before you joined the GSA on March 3rd?
No.
Okay.
Did you ever, do you know who Steve Davis is?
Yes.
Did you meet Amy Gleason before joining GSA?
No.
No.
Okay.
What about Ethan Choutran?
Yes.
Okay.
How did you meet Ethan Choutran?
Over Signaled, the same as I'd met with Nate.
Okay.
So was there.
It sounds like you were meeting a lot of people via Signal at this time.
that right?
Most of the Doge affiliates, yeah.
Okay.
Tell me who these Doge affiliates were.
You've just listed them.
Anyone else?
Not that I can remember.
Okay.
So prior to joining, those were the folks?
Nate Kavanaugh.
Nick Kavanaugh, Ethan Choutran, Anthony Armstrong, Josh Gruenbaum, Mike Sullivan, I believe is the last name, head of GSA Buildings.
Am I missing anybody?
You tell me this is life.
These are the names that I remember being early in the conversations.
After joining, you can imagine it's a mess.
But those are the folks that were core communications.
Okay.
Can we take a quick break?
Definitely, yeah.
Why don't we go off the record for a few minutes?
Times of 1107 a.m. is included media one off the record.
Doge Team Membership Confirmation00:15:51
Thanks.
Time's 11.21 a.m.
That's beginning to media two on the record.
Hey, Justin.
Hey.
Pick up where we left off.
Did you ever receive an official offer to join government?
Yes.
Okay.
And what was the form of that official offer?
A PDF document.
Okay.
Who sent that to you?
I don't remember.
Okay.
Was that sent to your personal email address?
Yes.
Okay.
Do you remember generally what the offer said?
Strike that.
Do you remember what kind of details were on that PDF?
Position, location of work, salary were effectively the things that stood out to me.
Okay, yeah.
What was the position?
Senior advisor to Stephen Hikian.
Okay.
What was the location of work?
GSA.
And what was the salary?
$150,000.
Okay.
Were you ever paid anything beyond that $150,000 in relation to your work for Doge or GSA?
No.
By anyone?
No.
Inside of government or outside of government?
Could you repeat the question again?
Were you ever paid anything on top of that $150,000 by anyone inside or outside of government in relation to your work with the GSA?
No.
What about with respect to your work for Doge?
No.
Okay.
And the start date was March 3rd, 2025.
Is that right?
Yes.
Okay.
You noted before that you interpreted your role to be to help Nate with whatever he was working on.
Do you remember testifying to that?
Yeah.
Okay.
Was that on the PDF that was sent to you?
My role was senior advisor to Stephen Hikian, who was the head of GSA.
Okay.
And Nate was an employee of GSA.
Okay.
So to understand the atmospherics, you understood your role to be with the GSA and your kind of mission at GSA to be to help Nate with whatever he was doing.
Abjection.
Is that fair to say?
Not exclusively, Nate, no.
Okay.
So what else did you interpret your mission?
Stephen Hickian was my boss and it was my understanding that Nate was working with Steve, Stephen, and I was just meant to start with Nate.
Okay.
Who did you communicate with more, Nate or Stephen?
I sat very close to Stephen, but dialogue, more so with Nate.
Okay.
So when did you meet Nate Kavanaugh?
March 3rd.
Was that in person?
Yes.
Were you communicating with them though before March 3rd?
To yes, to coordinate what to do the first day I showed up.
Okay.
Do you remember when that conversation took place?
The week before, so late February.
Okay.
You're no longer employed by the GSA, is that right?
Yes.
Okay.
Why'd you leave?
I just felt it was time.
When made you feel like it was done.
There was more opportunity for me elsewhere.
After six months of work for the GSA?
Yes, Stephen had been fired.
Okay.
Yeah.
And that affected your calculus and whether to stay at the GSA?
Yes, it did.
Okay.
Had Nate already left government when you left government?
I think so.
Was there any other reason that you left GSA?
It was better for me opportunistically to leave.
That was the crux of it.
Okay.
But I'm just kind of asking for the atmosphere there.
What makes you say that?
Well, Nate had left.
He was a close friend at that point.
And I felt my time was better served leaving GSA.
Okay.
Do you feel like there was mission misalignment at the time that you decided to leave?
Misalignment, no.
No.
Anthony had also left.
I was working with him.
Sorry.
Anthony Armstrong?
Anthony Armstrong.
Okay.
So a lot of the people that you were working with previously had left.
Yes.
And so you decided it was time for you to leave as well.
Yes.
Okay.
Were there culture changes associated with your leave?
Objection.
Like you said, most of the folks that I was working with had left.
Yeah.
But I guess I'm asking, like, besides the people, was there a change in direction that you saw at Doge or GSA that you didn't agree with?
No.
Okay.
So generally, say mission, different people, and you wanted to leave on that basis?
Yes.
Okay.
So tell me about Doge versus GSA, because we've been talking about both of them.
How do you interpret them to be different?
objection gsa was where i worked and And Doge felt more like a club of folks with a different mission than traditional folks that were career employees.
Okay, how would you describe that different mission?
Find savings and optimization, implement technology, streamline processes.
So would it be fair to say that you were a member of the Doge team working within GSA?
Yeah, that's fair.
Okay.
So tell me about this Doge team.
Who else was on this Doge team?
One that I had mentioned before, Josh, Nate, Ethan, Mike, Anthony, Stephen.
And when you say Stephen.
Hey, Kian.
Okay.
How did you gain an understanding of the mission of Doge, this Doge team or Doge club as you described it earlier?
I understood it as find the savings.
Sorry.
Do you have anything?
Just let him finish the sentence, though.
Sure, yeah.
I understood it as find the savings in the government that otherwise was being overlooked.
Implement technology to streamline processes so that the government could be more efficient.
And look out for the direction of executive orders and make sure that they're implemented.
It was really a broad mandate, and I was working with Nate.
Okay.
And sorry, I think we kind of walked past each other there.
I meant how did you gain that understanding, not what the understanding was.
Did someone tell you that that was your mission?
Yeah, in the interviews.
Okay.
What did they tell you?
Just that.
Go in, find savings, optimize where you can, introduce technology, streamline processes.
Who told you that in interviews?
Anthony, Josh, Mike, anyone else?
Maybe Ryan.
So Ryan.
Ryan Leppard.
Okay.
Ryan interviewed you.
Yes.
Okay.
This was before you joined on March 3rd.
Yes.
Were these conversations that you were having through which you gained an understanding for Doge's mission taking place in person?
The interviews, like I said, were on Signal.
The interviews were on Signal?
Yes.
Through photos.
I don't really know how Signal works.
Through tech, like phone calls through Signal?
Yes.
Okay.
FaceTimes?
Is that possible on Signal?
I think so.
Okay.
But were they phone calls without visual?
If I remember correctly, yeah.
Okay, got it.
There may have been some video, but I don't remember.
Who did you report to within the Doge team?
Josh, Stephen.
Not as much as I viewed Josh and Steven.
Okay.
So you kind of viewed them as your proper kind of bosses at Doge?
Yes.
Okay.
And Nate was less of a boss in that respect?
Yes, more of the same as you would look to a colleague that's been on the job longer.
Okay.
How often were you talking to Steve and Josh?
Two, three times a week.
Okay.
And so would they have been aware of the kind of work you were doing for Doge and GSA?
Yes.
Okay.
Were they giving you direction at Doge and GSA?
Not that I remember.
Okay.
I mean, what kinds of things would you talk about when you touch base with them two or three times a week?
Contracts, grants.
Okay.
Who did you understand to be the top people at Doge at the time of your employment?
Stephen, Josh, Anthony.
Yeah.
Okay.
Elon Musk?
Yes, although I had limited interaction with him.
Okay.
But you interacted with him?
Only very briefly.
Tell me about that.
There's meetings in EEOB to just talk about initiatives and progress.
These were meetings with several people or just you and Elon Musk?
50 or 80 people.
Yeah.
Okay.
So pretty sizable meetings.
Yes.
Okay.
And at these meetings you said you would talk about progress.
Is this progress as it relates to savings, grant terminations, things of that nature?
Yeah.
Streamlining, adopting new tech.
Yeah, status updates of the Doge leads at some of the biggest agencies.
Okay.
When you say Doge leads, you mean Doge team members detailed to different agencies?
Or onboarded through agencies that they were hired into.
Okay.
So at these meetings, would you talk about, let's say, the work that you were doing at the National Labor Relations Board, for instance?
Our team?
Not as much.
Okay.
No.
We were very much a small team.
Yeah.
And frankly, the government is very big, and we were a small team.
Okay.
Did anyone from your team ever present to this larger group?
Strike that actually.
When you say from our team, can you clarify what that means?
Myself, Nate Kavanaugh, Ethan Choutran, Marshall Wood, Jack Stein, Jonathan Mendelssohn.
Oversight and Reporting Structure00:03:43
And what was the purpose of that team or that group?
There's a long tail of independent agencies that don't report into a bureau level.
And every agency needed a Doge lead.
And our team was meant to be detailed onto every small agency to find optimization efforts, implement technology, streamline.
Did everyone on that team report to Steve and Josh like you did?
Yes.
Okay.
So they were overseeing your team.
Is that fair to say?
We reported back to them.
Okay.
But our team was focused again on the 150 small agencies.
So our progress was just more of an update.
They weren't pointing and saying go.
Okay.
How did you determine as a group what agencies to work with?
There's a long list of this is all publicly available.
There's a long list of agencies and their spend, their annual spend and the congressional appropriators that do not report into a bureau-level agency, as in they do not have a Doge lead yet.
And so we went down the list by appropriation and onboarded to each one.
Okay.
And how did you get a sense of that mission?
Executive order dropped that said every agency needed a Doge lead.
Our team was focused on, again, the independents because all the bureau-level agencies already had Doge leads.
So based on executive order, our team onboarded to those agencies.
Okay.
Who put the team together?
Nate.
Josh, Stephen, Anthony.
How do you know that?
We were reporting into them.
They seemed to be the leads.
Do you have an understanding about who was creating the directives and the priorities for your team to address?
Elon had made it clear that there was a number of small agencies that needed Doge leads.
Okay.
So him.
Okay.
So Elon Musk, your understanding is that Elon Musk kind of created the idea for the work that your team was engaged in?
Based on the executive order.
Right.
Okay.
Was he getting updates on your work?
Maybe.
He's...
I don't know.
I don't know for sure.
I know that he was getting updates on progress with contracts and grant terminations to see how much we were saving.
Yeah.
Elon Musk Update Requests00:02:59
And throughout this time that you were working with this team, did you have a group chat that all of you were in and communicating on?
Signal.
Okay.
Did it ever leave Signal, these communications?
No.
Okay.
And so, for instance, if you had to call Nate, you would call him via signal?
Yes.
Okay.
Same with like Ethan and Steve and Josh, everyone else?
Okay.
us.
Um.
Are they still there, by the way?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so they can hear me.
Okay.
I think Jacob is the .text name.
Yeah.
Jacob, can you hear me?
Yes.
Oh, great.
Okay, can you pull up tab two?
This will be Exhibit 2, and this is Document Bait Stamped US-000061501.
Can you see that?
Could you zoom in a bit, Jacob?
Let's take it, Brian.
Thank you.
Should be good.
Can you see that now?
Yes.
Take it in, and if you want to have them scroll so you can read anything, feel free to do that.
You recognize this document?
Privilege and Attorney Communications00:07:08
It looks like I was on the email chain.
Do you recognize the document?
Yeah.
Okay.
And this was that first email on March 10th, Monday, was sent looks like exactly a week after you joined the government.
Is that right?
Yep.
Okay.
And so at this point, you had met Mr. Kavanaugh, right?
Yes.
Okay.
And can you scroll up really quickly, Jacob?
Great.
So if we look at the top email, it says from Nate Kavanaugh to Ryan Leopard, it's CCing Ethan Xiao Tran and Justin Fox, which is you, right?
If we scroll down to the first email.
Yeah, that one there.
Yep.
Okay.
Did you receive this entire chain in the ordinary course of your work at GSA?
I don't remember.
Okay.
Does it appear to be authentic?
Yeah, it appears to be authentic.
Okay, great.
So let me read the first email sent by Nate Kavanaugh to Ryan Leopard.
It says, can you help draft three detail agreements for Ethan Justin and I for the below it agencies?
The first four are priorities in parentheses tomorrow given an upcoming EO.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
Okay.
Can you describe what you understand this to strike that?
Do you understand what Mr. Kavanaugh is saying here?
He's saying the first four agencies, we would like detail agreements for myself, him, and Ethan.
Okay.
And detail agreements are what, in your understanding?
To be onboarded as pseudo-employees under just contractual language that we are GSA employees who are now under the authority of whomever is countersigning on the agency's behalf.
Do you understand, do you have an understanding for why the first four were priorities here?
Nate says given an upcoming EO.
Okay.
And do you have an understanding of how you knew that an upcoming EO was imminent?
Objection?
I didn't.
Nate did.
Okay.
Apparently.
Okay.
So you didn't know that there was an upcoming EO upon receiving this email?
Upon receiving this email, I wasn't on the initial one.
We were following EOs before this.
Okay.
The EO was to go to every agency.
Okay.
To go to every... Every small agency to be on board as a Doge Lead.
Okay.
Okay, and the first four agencies there are Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Minority Business Development Agency.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
Okay.
And do you understand that there was something about those four agencies that were specifically that made them specifically attached to the upcoming EO that Nate references?
I'm just going to caution you to be aware of privilege concerns and not answer in a way that would reveal privilege discussions.
Okay.
Could you quickly explain privilege to me again?
Okay.
Can we go off the record?
That's okay.
Sorry, this is...
Time is 11.48 a.m.
Clues media to up the record. Time now is 11.51 a.m.
This because media three up the right all right we're back.
What's your understanding of privilege, Mr. Fox?
Objection.
I mean you can attempt to answer, but it seems to be directly attempting to solicit what I just said to you.
I don't see what would be stopping him from answering how he understands privilege.
There are certain things that I have privilege or other parties have privilege to that do not need to be discussed here.
I guess you kind of used the word privilege in defining privilege.
What do you mean by that?
There are certain things that some parties have the right to know related to what's being discussed.
And yeah, that's my understanding.
Anything to do with attorneys?
Communications with attorneys?
Sometimes.
Objection, that was not a question.
Okay.
Is your understanding that privilege is triggered by your communications with attorneys?
Objection.
Could you rephrase?
Do you understand that, strike that, is it your understanding that a communication with an attorney with whom you have an attorney-client privilege is what creates a privilege?
Objection.
Could you restate without using privilege, I guess?
Yeah.
Well, I'm trying to define the term, or at least get your understanding of your definition for the term.
Is it your understanding that communications that don't have attorneys in them are not protected by privilege?
objection? I'm not sure.
Okay.
So that's not something Ms. Dowd just told you?
Objection.
You should not be asking what I have advised him.
Excuse me.
You can instruct him not to answer, but please don't instruct me what questions to ask.
So you can, are you instructing him not to answer questions?
Do not respond to questions where the response is things that I told you during a privileged communication.
Agency Detailing Questions00:11:20
Okay.
Great.
Okay.
Well, I'll say for the record that if your interpretation of privilege is that you shouldn't be talking about conversations that had no attorneys present during the conversation, we're going to be in a place to challenge that privilege.
We've discussed it with your counsel before, with Ms. Dowd before.
And if that's what you instructed you during the break, then I think that'll be a larger topic of discussion going forward in this case.
And I'm just going to object to that whatever you would call it that you just provided that was not a question and some sort of strange statement that you made to the witness.
Okay, thank you.
So let's go back to this document.
The first four entries on this list seem to be related to some sort of upcoming EO.
Does that appear to be correct?
That appears to be correct.
Okay.
Do you know what EO that was in relation to?
No.
Okay.
Did you end up getting detail to those four agencies?
Yes, I believe so.
I'm not certain about Minority Business Development Agency, but yes, for the top three.
Okay.
What about the bottom for the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, the Federal Mediation Conciliation Service, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness?
Were you detailed to those four?
Woodrow Wilson, yes.
The other three, I'm not sure.
I don't remember.
Okay.
You don't remember whether you were detailed to those agencies or not?
Yes, at one point our team was not all detailed into the same agency.
Okay.
And there are 150 or so?
So I don't remember.
Okay.
Do you know roughly how many agencies you were detailed to?
Precisely no.
20 to 40 is probably the band.
Okay.
And what was your goal in being detailed to these agencies?
Help the agency lead find efficiencies.
Savings via contracts.
Okay.
Terminating grants.
Terminating grants, ensuring that they were aligned with executive orders.
Okay.
And that took place at somewhere between 20 and 40 agencies.
Is that right?
For me, yes.
For you, yeah.
Thanks.
Okay, let's go to Jacob.
Let's go to tab three.
Actually, sorry, before I move on, can you scroll up all the way to the top?
I just want to.
Great.
And then I just want to read this into the record.
On March 14th, 2025, Nate Kavanaugh sends to Ryan Leopards.
He's seeing you and Ethan an email.
He says, hi, Ryan.
Can you send detail agreements for the three of us for IMLS?
Keith Sonderling is the new director and will counter sign on their behalf.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
Okay.
Were you detailed to IMLS?
Yes.
Okay.
What do you understand Ryan Leopard's role to be in the government at this time?
White House liaison for GSA.
Okay.
Do you have an understanding of how Ryan was being directed at this time?
No.
Okay.
This was someone that you had met quite recently at this point.
Is that fair to say?
Okay.
Do you know who he reported to?
No.
Okay.
But it appears that he had some power to help you and other members of your team get detailed to different agencies.
Is that fair?
Yes.
Was that yes?
Repeat the question again for me.
Can you read back the question, please?
The question is, It appears that he had some power to help you and members of your team get detailed to different agencies.
Is that fair?
He countersigned all of the detail agreements.
Okay.
So that's a yes.
That's fair.
Okay.
Okay.
Let's get tab number three up, Jacob.
Thank you.
Okay, so tab number three is the text for Executive Order 14238 of March 14th, 2025, called Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy.
Under Section 2, it names several agencies.
Is this the EO, to your understanding, that Nate was referencing in that email?
This is Exhibit 3, yes.
To my understanding, based on what you showed me?
Yes.
It's fair to say that based on that email and the substance of that email, that this could have been the EO that he was referring to?
It could have been.
Okay, great.
And we see some agencies listed.
Could you maybe zoom in a little bit, Jacob, just so the text is a little bigger?
That's good.
Thank you.
So we see here many of the same agencies that were listed in that email.
Is that fair to say?
That is fair to say.
Okay.
Were you detailed to any of these agencies?
Woodrow Wilson, yes.
IMLS, yes.
The other five, I'm not sure.
Why are you not sure?
There were 150 agencies.
At some point, we all split up, and not all of us were onboarded onto all of the same agencies.
So you were, so you don't remember all the agencies that you yourself were detailed to?
Is that fair to say?
The ones that I worked with, I would remember, hence why Woodrow Wilson, IMLS, yes.
But again, at some point, we stopped having all of us on board.
Okay.
And so I may have been onboarded to Community Development Financial Institution Fund, but I didn't spend time with the team at that agency.
Okay, I see.
So there's a distinction here between where you were kind of actually detailed versus where you actually did work.
Spending time and doing work.
Got it.
Okay.
So when you say you don't know, what you were saying was that you don't know if you were officially detailed there.
Yes.
Okay.
But you know that you did not do work there.
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.
Got it.
That's helpful.
Okay.
So did you understand that this EO did you understand this EO to be a direction for your team in particular?
These are independent agencies that do not fall under a bureau-level agency.
So yes.
Okay.
Did you use this EO to understand your mission in your smaller group at Doge?
It certainly gave direct guidance that these agencies were meant to be reduced.
And our team was the only one focused on independent agencies.
Did you talk to anyone about that within your Doge team?
About what?
About this EO as a directive for the work you were doing doing with that team.
Dealing with which team?
With your small agencies team.
Yes.
Okay.
Who did you talk to on your team about this EO?
Everyone on the team.
Eight.
At the time, Nate Ethan.
Justin Eminetti.
Okay.
And who's Justin Eminetti?
Doge Legal.
Okay.
Was he advising the small agencies team?
He was joining us for meetings.
And yeah, getting the legal backdrop for every agency.
Okay.
And who were in these meetings with Justin Eminetti?
The leadership teams of the agencies.
Who are those?
NEH, IMLS, NEA, any agency that we went to.
National Endowment for Humanities Work00:15:00
So under Section 2, which is titled Reducing the Scope of the Federal Bureaucracy, it says A, except as provided in this subsection, B of this section.
the non-statutory components and functions of the following governmental entities shall be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.
And such entities shall reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
Okay.
Did you understand your goal at the agencies that you were detailed to to comply with that directive and the executive order?
Objection.
For these agencies.
Okay.
Yes.
And so this is what you would have used to understand your work at the Woodrow Wilson Center?
Yes.
Okay.
Do you know what the Woodrow Wilson Center does?
Issue scholarship grants.
Okay.
Anything else?
That's my understanding.
Grant-making organization.
Okay.
A grant-making organization.
Did you do anything to understand more than that before you were detailed there to eliminate it to its statutorily to its statutory minimum?
Yes.
We met with the board.
Okay.
And you said IMLS you were also detailed to and worked with.
That's right.
Okay.
Do you understand the function of IMLS?
Yes.
Okay.
What's that?
A grant-making organization, specifically for museum and library services.
Okay.
And did you worked there as well, right?
I was detailed there.
Okay.
And did you succeed in implementing this EO there?
I'm not sure.
You don't remember?
I'm not sure if it's precisely what's written in this EO.
What did you do there?
Found optimization through grant-making terminations and workforce terminations and overall worked with the agency leads to comply with this EO.
Okay.
You also worked with the Inter-American Foundation during your time at the government, is that right?
Yes.
Okay.
Do you have an understanding of the mission of the Inter-American Foundation?
Yes.
Okay.
You also are working with the U.S. Institute of Peace, is that right?
Yes.
Okay.
Do you have an understanding of their mission?
Yes.
How would you describe that?
A peacekeeping organization that primarily does international affairs involvement.
Okay.
Who did you work with on that project?
Nate Cavanaugh, Ken Jackson.
Justin Aminetti.
I think that was it.
Okay.
And the Millennium Challenge Corporation?
You also worked there, right?
Yes.
Okay.
What was your mission to your understanding of your work with the Millennium Challenge Corporation?
Be installed as the Doge leads.
Find efficiencies.
Eliminate wasteful spend.
And who did you work with on that?
Nate Cavanaugh, Justin Eminetti, Jack Stein, I think that's all.
Okay.
Did you report to anyone during your work with the MCC, U.S. Institute of Peace, Inter-American Foundation?
I guess let me leave it there.
Did you report to anyone?
Yes, the agency leads.
Okay.
And then you went to the National Labor Relations Board.
Is that right?
Yes.
Okay.
Do you have an understanding of what they do?
Yes.
What do they do?
Manage disputes between employers and employees.
Okay.
Did you know that before you were detailed there?
At a high level.
Okay.
But we had many meetings with our team.
Okay.
Who from the Doge team did you work with on that project?
Nate Kavanaugh.
Justin Aminetti.
And I believe that's it.
Okay.
And you were detailed and worked with the National Endowment for the Humanities as well, right?
Yes.
Okay.
Do you have an understanding of the mission of the NEH?
A grant-making organization.
For humanities.
Okay.
thing more than that?
Yeah, I mean, that's the highest level, like, way to describe it.
Okay.
I guess what kind of grants you said for the humanities grants.
Okay.
When were you detailed to the NEH?
Sometime around mid-March.
And just taking a quick step back, during your detail and during your work with these agencies that we've listed, how were you communicating with the small teams that you've listed?
Abduction.
Which small teams?
So for the Millennium Challenge Corporation, you named some people that you worked with on that project.
You can rename them if you.
Sure.
We were in person every day.
Okay.
And did you speak on Signal as well with this team?
About specifically those agencies?
Yeah.
Signal was used to coordinate where we were.
Okay.
The real work about each of these agencies was done over email or GSA phones.
Okay.
Great.
So how do you understand your mission during your detail to the NEH?
Work with Mike to find optimization efforts through grants, contracts, and personnel.
Great.
And how did you come to understand that as being the mission?
That was the mission for all of our agencies we onboarded to was find savings through contracts, grants, personnel.
And that directive was coming from Steve and Josh?
The executive order wrote a pretty clear mandate that every agency needed a Doge lead and we were focused on all of the small agencies.
So that direction was clear.
Okay.
So who would you, if you ever came upon a question that you needed to elevate to a superior, who would that superior be?
A question about what?
About your work with relation to these agencies.
Well, we always deferred to the head of the agencies.
I'm sorry, let me repeat my question or ask my question differently.
If you had a question that related to what the mandate of Doge was during your detail to these agencies, who would you ask?
I'm not sure I understand who I'm asking about what we're doing at these agencies.
It was to find savings.
So through contracts, grants, and personnel, be detailed onto small agencies, the 150 or so, work with the agency lead to execute on that executive order.
Okay.
So I guess when I ask who you would go to with your questions, I'm trying to get a sense for who in the, if there was anyone at the Doge team that was Helping you to understand what your role was as a part of Doge as you were being detailed to these agencies?
Jackson.
Me personally, no.
I generally followed Nate.
Okay.
So the mandate was clear.
I mean, it was install as Doge leads on independent agencies to find savings.
Right.
But if any question came up about the proper way to find savings, where to look for savings, what kind of projects would be continued versus cut, were you just using your own discretion based on your understanding of the EOs to do that?
We worked with the agency leads.
Okay.
So how did you end up on the team that got detailed to any agent in particular?
I ended up on Nate's team, per Josh Gurrenbaum and Anthony telling me that I'm on Nate's team.
Right.
Which is the small agencies team, which is focused on the independent agencies.
So all independent agencies need a Doge lead.
So I work with Nate and team to get onboarded onto those agencies and work with the leads to find savings.
Right, but I guess why NEH and not some other small agency?
Do you have an understanding of that?
We had a list of 150.
We probably onboarded to 120.
That list was ordered by congressional appropriations.
The common sense approach is to go to the ones that have the highest congressional appropriations that are independent.
And so we onboarded to all of them.
Right, but why were you?
So you worked with the NEH, but perhaps not Marshall Wood, for instance.
Why were you detailed to the NEH and why did you work with the NEH and not Marshall Wood?
Well, at the time, it was just myself, Nate, and Ethan.
Okay.
In the small agencies.
In the agencies.
Okay, so Marshall Wood would have come later.
He wasn't there.
Jack Stein wasn't there.
Jonathan Mendelson wasn't there.
So it was just the three of us.
Okay.
So the entire and this team.
Thank you for clarifying.
The entire team, the entire small agencies team at the time of that detail to NEH went to NEH?
Yes.
Is that fair to say?
I think.
Okay.
Because I don't know if Ethan.
Ethan didn't work with us.
It was really Nate and myself.
Okay.
So did you use any particular strike that?
So you noted that one of your goals in getting detailed to these agencies was to look for savings, terminate grants, et cetera, et cetera, right?
Exactly.
Could you rephrase?
One of the goals in getting detailed to these agencies was finding savings, right?
Work with the agency leads to find optimization through personnel grants contracts.
And part of that was through the termination of grants, right?
Part of that, yeah.
Okay.
Did you use any particular methodology in assessing NEH grants for termination?
There was an executive order that said to eliminate spend on DEI and other wasteful government spending, and that was the lens.
Okay.
So DEI would have been one kind of guidepost for the grants to terminate?
Yeah.
Okay.
How did you interpret DEI?
The EEO explicitly laid out the details.
I don't remember it off the top of my head.
It's okay.
I'm asking for your understanding of it.
Yeah.
My understanding was exactly what was written in the EO.
Okay.
So can you tell me?
I don't remember what was in the EO.
So right now, do you have an understanding of what DEI is?
Yeah.
Okay.
So what's your understanding as you sit here today in this deposition?
Well, it was exactly what was written in the EO.
And so any time that 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 relation to it.
Okay.
But I guess I'm stepping back from your methodology strictly in terminating the grants.
Do you have an understanding as you sit here today of what DEI means?
Yeah.
Okay.
So what's your understanding of what it means?
Well, it is exactly what was written in the EO.
DEI Executive Order Overview00:03:15
Okay, so.
And I don't have the EO in front of me, but we would always reference back to the EO and make sure that this grant was in compliance with the EO.
I understand that.
Okay, but I'm not asking necessarily about what was in the EO.
I'm asking very specifically about your present understanding of what of DEI.
Do you have a present understanding of DEI?
Okay.
Can you explain what that present understanding is?
Well, it is just easier for me to be referencing back to the EO.
Are you refusing to answer the question?
I'm not refusing to answer the question.
I just feel that referencing back to the verbatim executive order was the best way for us to capture all of the DEI language.
And so I think giving a high-level overview of what I could relay as DEI is not going to do justice what was written in the EO.
And that's okay.
We can look at the EO as well.
I'm asking you for, I mean, this is a deposition.
I'm asking you questions.
You're under oath.
You're required to answer them.
So what is your understanding of what DEI means?
Well, I think I would say, again, that I would go back to the EO to make sure I'm capturing enough.
I don't feel comfortable saying a high-level overview because it is such a big bucket, and there's just a lot of pieces of the puzzle that.
What's a part of the bucket?
Gender fluidity, sort of promoting like promoting subsets of LGBTQ plus that might alienate another part of a community.
Again, it was just easier for us to reference back into the EO.
Okay.
And I don't want to give you a broad overview because it's like, at the end of the day, it is capturing, it is all-encompassing in the EO.
It's how we did our methodology.
Right.
Do you always refer to EOs to gain an understanding of words used in your typical daily vernacular?
Abjection.
What do you mean?
You say that you have an understanding of what DEI means, and when I ask you, you say you need to reference the EO.
Do you need to reference EOs to define every word you use in your everyday life?
Abjection.
No.
Okay.
So what's stopping you from defining DEI to your understanding as you sit here today on January 28th, 2026?
It wouldn't be capturing enough of how big the topic is.
DEI is a very broad structure.
Giving my limited recall of what's included is just not.
Okay.
I understand.
Jim, we go to actually hold on.
Defining DEI Concepts Broadly00:05:10
So who did you work with internally at NEH?
Were there people at any age kind of embedded in NEH that you worked with during your detail there?
When you say embedded in NEH, you mean just employees of any age?
Yeah, that's what I mean.
Mike McDonald, Adam Wilson, Praneeth.
Don't remember her last name.
Okay.
Brett, Bob Lee, there are others, but the employees of NEH, yes.
Okay.
And how did you communicate with those employees?
Email.
Anything else?
My GSA phone with Mike.
Anything else?
No.
Okay.
Jacob, can we pull up tab four?
and this will be Exhibit 4.
Alright, so this is Exhibit 4.
It's executive order one four one five one of January 2025 The title is Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.
Did I read that title correctly, Justin?
Yes.
Okay.
Is this the DEI executive order that you're referencing?
That I'm referencing when?
When you said you referred to the EO to define your understanding of DEI.
Could you scroll down?
Let me just read it, if you don't mind.
Sure, yeah.
Yes.
Okay.
So fair to say you've seen this executive order before.
Yes.
And you referenced it in terminating grants in deciding, excuse me, in deciding which grants to mark for termination.
Mike McDonald and our team.
This was a guiding principle for terminating grants, but not the only principle.
Okay, great.
Can you scroll up again, Jacob?
So it says radical, wasteful, DEI.
Do you have an understanding of what radical means is used here?
No.
What about DEI programs and preferencing?
Do you have an understanding of what that means?
Diversity, equity, inclusion programs.
So be that special task force within agencies or even extending into grants and then preferencing being a bias toward spend on DEI programs relative to others.
Okay.
So now maybe we can more comfortably talk about what DEI means.
Earlier you said something about LGBTQ.
Were there other things that you interpreted as being DEI other than LGBTQ?
Objection.
LGBTQ Interpretation Challenges00:08:44
Do you have some examples?
I was going to ask you the same thing.
Do you have examples of what you would consider to be DEI, other than LGBTQ+.
So, for instance, there was a $400,000 grant for gay and trans travel guides in SF.
That's DEI.
Do you need others?
I don't think no, it's okay.
Can we pull up tab number 5, Jacob?
Currently displayed as Executive Order 14168.
This is exhibit number five.
And it reads, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.
Have you seen this executive order before?
No.
You've never seen this.
Could you scroll down?
You can pause.
How long
does this go?
It's nine pages long.
What was it stated?
Wait, I'm talking to you.
I don't know why I'm yelling.
If you need to be able to read the full exhibit, you're entitled to do that.
I mean, before we get to that, is this a document based on what you've seen so far that you recognize?
Maybe.
He's entitled to see the full exhibit.
This is why you normally have printouts.
Okay, I'm asking him a question, and he just answered it.
Thank you for answering.
You said maybe you've seen the exhibit before?
I'd have to read it to remember.
Okay, that's fine.
It mentions biological reality of sex.
It says defending women, protecting women.
Are these concepts that would have come up during your analysis of marking grants for termination at some of the agencies that you were detailed to?
projection.
Could you
scroll down?
I have a standing question.
He is entitled to be able to read an exhibit.
You cannot prevent him from being able to see the full exhibit.
That is completely inappropriate.
Council, I can hear you.
I'm asking him a question that actually isn't about the entirety of the exhibit.
In a deposition, you are entitled to read an exhibit, and for some reason, you are not allowing him to see the full exhibit.
Ma'am, he's reading it right now.
He can't see the full thing because you have elected to not provide any copies of any of the exhibits.
So if he is asking to scroll down to read the exhibit, you need to allow him to do that.
He, of course, can scroll down if it would be.
Because he doesn't control the computer.
He just asked to scroll down and you tried to prevent him from being able to do that.
Because you said he has to answer the question before doing that.
So allow him to read the exhibit if that's what he wants.
This is pretty basic.
You can say it's basic.
I asked him a question.
Well, it's basic to be able for a witness to be able to look at a full exhibit during a deposition.
I have never encountered a situation where an attorney taking a deposition will not allow a witness to read an entire exhibit.
For the record, just because this is still on the record, he's absolutely, I have not prevented him in any way from reading the document.
Okay, please allow him to do so then.
And I'd ask that you keep your speaking objections briefer than that.
This is not an objection to a question.
This is an objection to the way you're conducting this deposition.
He is repeatedly asked to scroll down.
Council, I hear you.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
I'm entitled to say what I want.
Don't cut me off.
I'll ask again, is this generally a document that you recognize, Mr. Fox?
Maybe.
Okay, that's fine.
Are concepts like defending women, gender ideology, extremism, biological truth, did those come up in the context of selecting grants for terminations?
Yes.
So if you scroll down, you
can keep going.
I'll note for the record that the witness has been reading a nine-page document for almost five minutes now.
And I'll note for the record that it's challenging to read the documents because no copies of any exhibits have been provided.
Some of the definitions in here, yes, would have come up by way of DEI.
Which ones?
I can't see them all.
Okay.
But what's the basis for you saying that?
Which ones have you seen that make you say what you just said?
The gender ideology piece and sex as an immutable biological classification as either male or female.
Grant Meeting Leadership Details00:14:09
Could you scroll down?
There's a lot of definitions in here.
I'm not asking you to read every single definition, though.
But you asked, if I would use this in interpreting grants, and I can't see the document, yes.
Would you use some of the concepts that have been written into this document as a basis for analyzing grants to mark for termination?
I'm not asking for exhaustively.
asking if some of these concepts you used some of these concepts would have come up in discussions about grants Yeah.
We can move on to tab 6A, Jacob.
And this will be Exhibit 6.
Who did you speak with about those concepts?
Mike, Adam, Nate?
Ethan Choutran?
No.
Okay.
How did you discuss those concepts with Nate, Mike, and Adam?
On a grant-by-grant basis.
Okay.
And was this in person, via text, signal?
In person, for Adam and Mike, we did comprehensive reviews.
Yes.
They also did their own individual independent work between the two of them.
Got it.
Did anyone specifically instruct you to apply the concepts that were laid forth in EO14151 and EO14168 to your grant termination process?
Which EOs are you referring to?
The two that we just looked at.
What were the titles?
The titles were Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing was EO 14151.
And EO 14168 was Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to Federal Government.
And I'll repeat the question.
When was the second one released?
I think I didn't get an answer there.
The nine-page one.
right, like January 20th, it looks like.
25.
2025.
And then repeat the question, sorry.
Could you please read back the question for the witness?
Question.
Did anyone specifically instruct you to apply the concepts that were laid forth in EO 14151 and EO14168 to your grant termination process?
Mike was the one directing his team to identify DEI grants.
And we came in to help him with that.
The whole purpose of us being on board is to assist in finding savings.
And Mike's team had already been at this for close to a month.
Okay, great.
So we're looking at exhibit six now.
This is tab 6A.
Can we scroll to the bottom of this, Jacob?
What document is this?
Sorry.
This is US-000050393.
Okay.
Could you scroll up so you could see the introduction?
Scroll up, up, up.
Yeah, just right there.
Yep, that's good.
Okay.
So it looks like on March 13th, 2025, Adam Wolfson writes to what appears to be you and Nate Kavanaugh.
Is that right?
Objection.
Is that right?
I see it's just Adam Wolfson wrote.
Yeah, and then it says, hi, Nate.
Hi, Justin.
Okay.
Am I included on the CC?
I think above.
We could scroll up if you'd like.
Jacob, could you scroll up, please?
From 8.
Okay.
Okay.
So you understand that to be you and Nate Kavanaugh?
Is that right?
Yes.
That he's addressing.
He goes on to say, great meeting you yesterday and catching up today.
As discussed, I've copied below the link for the award spreadsheet created by Brett that the program directors used for their historical review of NEH's grants since January 2021.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
Okay.
And this is generally tracking the, when he says program directors are used for historical review, that's tracking the process you were just kind of describing, right?
That NEH had its own review.
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
He says great meeting you yesterday, and this was on March 13th.
Would this have been a day after you first met him for the first time?
I would think so.
Okay.
Do you remember that meeting that you had with him on March 12th?
The specific contents?
No, but we did have a meeting at the office.
Okay.
And this was at the NEH office?
Yes.
Okay.
And who was present at that meeting?
Mike and Adam.
I believe those were the only two.
They hadn't returned to office as a team.
Got it.
And Mr. Kavanaugh.
And Nate.
Okay.
Was that also the first time that you had met Mr. McDonald?
That's right.
Okay.
How did you set up the meeting on that day?
I don't remember.
Okay.
Would it have been through Signal, do you think?
No.
Not with Mike and Adam.
Okay.
Maybe through email?
Yeah.
Is that mostly?
Maybe through email is the most likely.
Okay.
And there was no one else besides you four in that meeting.
Is that fair to say?
I think so, although, like I said, the specific contents, I know at one point we'd met with Pranitha and Brett, although there might have been some follow-up meetings.
Okay.
Do you know who actually set up this meeting?
Like who called it into effect?
I don't remember.
Okay.
Do you remember who led the meeting?
Myself, Nate, and Mike.
It wasn't really a lead situation.
It was a where can we help?
What have you been doing?
I noticed you didn't say Adam.
Adam was certainly there, but Mike was the head of the agency.
Okay.
So we deferred to him.
And do you remember the content of the discussion?
Talk to us about what you've been doing since January 20th.
How has that been going?
Tell us more about NEH and your alignment with the EOs, hence our discussion about the grant review.
Okay.
And do you understand the Brett as reference in this email to be Brett Bobley?
Yes.
It says it's, well, strike that.
Do you remember the disposition of Mr. McDonald and Mr. Wolfson during this meeting?
No.
No?
Was it a typical meeting between professionals?
Yes.
Did anyone voice any frustration or surprise at members of the Doge team interacting with them to work on their agency projects?
I don't remember.
Okay.
Yeah.
Why'd you pause for so long?
I was trying to think.
I actually could not remember, like I said, the specific contents of this meeting.
I know based on Adam's email that you've just showed me that we obviously talked about the spreadsheet that the team had been doing, but the demeanor of the team is, there was a lot of meetings following this.
Okay.
Was there ever a point where maybe employees of any age expressed surprise, discontent at Doge's involvement with NEH's process?
No.
No.
Not at all.
Not that you saw.
Yeah, not that I saw, right.
Okay, can you scroll down, please, Jacob?
It goes on to say there's also a tab for agency-wide grants, which applies mainly to ARP awards and chairs awards.
A few of the directors still need to review awards made through their office for this tab and enter their comments.
Mike and I will appreciate having your thoughts and suggestions.
We've set aside a block of time Monday morning to finalize the list for OMB.
And I think, can you scroll down quickly, Jacob, and then it's all the way to the bottom?
Great.
And then all the way up.
Could you go to the body of that email that Adam sent again, just so we can see the full email?
Perfect.
Oh, wait.
Oh, could you hold it there?
Yeah, sorry.
Go down again, Jacob.
Thanks.
Yeah, I just actually realized I skipped a paragraph.
The second paragraph, after the first one that I read, is the record.
At the very beginning of talking about this email was, quote, it's broken down by program office, each one having its own tab.
The directors reviewed the grants made through their office and entered comments for the three relevant categories, i.e. DEI slash DEIA, gender ideology, and environmental justice, and rated them based on level of involvement with any of the categories, high, medium, low, not an A. Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
Okay.
Was it your understanding that, did this track your understanding of the review process upon joining the NEH, upon being detailed to NEH?
Exactly.
This aligns with...
Sure.
So DEI, gender ideology, and environmental justice.
That's what the team was looking at.
Was that also something that you looked at during your review process of grants?
Yes.
Okay.
One of the pieces we looked at it.
Okay.
It also says high, medium, and low there.
Do you have an understanding of what that means?
The interpretation of the directors and the level of, at their discretion, involvement of DEI, DEIA, gender ideology, and environmental justice.
Environmental justice.
This DEI, DEIA, gender ideology, and environmental justice.
Great.
Okay.
And then we'll scroll up a bit.
Jacob, thanks.
Environmental Justice Flagging00:16:08
Okay, then Nate Kavanaugh responds and he says, thanks, Adam.
Justin is going to run point on preparing the grant report for your meeting on Monday.
We'll be in touch if any questions arise before then.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
I've got probably one more exhibit before we can break for a little bit.
Can you pull up exhibit 6B?
Or excuse me, tab 6B.
This will be Exhibit 7.
Okay.
This is an email from, excuse me.
This is document US-000045042, exhibit number 7.
This appears to be an email from you, Justin Fox, to Mike McDonald and Adam Wolfson, CCing Nate Kavanaugh.
Does that appear to be right?
Yes.
Okay.
Do you recognize this email?
Okay.
The first and pardon.
Would this have been an email that you sent in the ordinary course of your work as a detailed to NEH?
This was work that Mike and Adam asked me to do.
You didn't answer my question.
Was this yeah, that's what they wanted me to do, so yeah.
Okay, so your answer is yes.
This was yeah, this is pretty ordinary course.
Okay, um, it appears authentic, yes, okay.
Um, let me read the first, well, actually, yeah, let's read the first uh paragraph.
Mike Adam, hope you both had a good weekend.
See attached for our review of NEH grants, census, and contracts.
It will be easier to connect over the phone when convenient and discuss what we've pulled together.
Let me know when works for you tomorrow.
Below summarizes the attachments along with key areas for your input.
So, I guess let me start with who's being referred to here.
When you say our review of NEH grants, are you referring to you and Mr. Kavanaugh?
Yes.
Okay.
And you say it's easier to connect over phone in the second sentence.
Would that have been through your GSA phone?
Yes.
Okay.
And to his government phone?
Yes.
Okay.
Is it possible that that would have been a communication on your personal devices?
No.
Okay.
And then it says, discuss what we've pulled together.
Again, are you referring to you and Mr. Kavanaugh?
Yes.
Okay.
But at this point, you were aware that NEH was doing its own parallel review, right?
Could you rephrase?
Was it your understanding that the NEH employees were reviewing document, reviewing grants for termination based on the EOs that we looked at before?
DEI, Gender Ideology, Environmental Justice.
And so you're saying after or alongside me reviewing these grants?
Or before?
I guess, let me start just kind of like without any chronology.
Sure.
Were you aware that the NEH was reviewing grants to mark for termination by the employees of the NEH?
Objection to form.
Yes.
Okay.
What's your understanding of why you and Mr. Kavanaugh would then review grants in addition to what was being done by NEH?
Well, for one, there was speed in which this was getting done, and the EO mandated a 60-day timeline.
We needed to help him move that process along.
And this is all at the request of Michael.
So we came in, we spent the whole weekend reviewing grants for him, And that was what he wanted us to do.
Okay, the next paragraph says: grants, we reviewed all active grants for DEI involvement and marked them accordingly.
Page one is a summarized view of the grant details on page 2389.
Grants are shown on page 2389 in descending order of dollar amount by division.
Page 2389 shows details for grants for active grants which were flagged as having DEI involvement only.
It does not show details for active grants without DEI involvement or grants which are expired/slash ended.
Please review the active grants flagged for DEI involvement and mark your decision in the MM slash AW in the Excel.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
Okay.
When you use the word DEI in this email, are you referring to what we saw in EO 14151?
I'm referring to the same parameters that the team was reviewing the grants for.
Okay.
Oh, sorry.
Just that was encompassing of DEI, DEIA, environmental justice, and however else they were reviewing the grants.
Okay.
What did you understand their protocol to be?
I didn't, it was what Mike had told them to do.
Okay.
And how did you interpret those same, so DEI, for instance, how did you gain an understanding for what DEI meant in the context of assessing NEH grants?
Well, I think these grants shown here are only the ones that the team flagged.
So to answer your question, I didn't need to interpret anything.
This was just a consolidated view of all the grants that the team had done reviews of.
You say that our review of NEH grants?
Yeah.
I think.
Is it your testimony that you actually didn't do a review of NEH grants?
Oh, we did.
Okay.
But this grant doc was a consolidated view of the work that his team had done.
You'll see it says, shows details for active grants, which were flagged as having involvement for DEI.
It does not show details for active grants without DEI involvement or grants which have expired or ended.
So this is take the work that the team has done and put it into something that Mike and Adam can review ahead of a meeting that they had, which was for pending grants or existing awards.
They had it with their board of directors.
Okay.
Thank you.
We can take that down, Jacob.
I appreciate that.
Okay, so you were reviewing, you and Nate were reviewing grants.
Is that fair to say?
Yes.
Okay.
And part of that review invoked an application of your understanding of DEI, gender ideology, and environmental justice.
Is that fair to say?
Direction.
For the ones that were flagged as not having involvement, part of the lens that we looked at it was from what you just described.
Okay.
What methodology did you use to flag a grant along those lines?
Again, the team had already done high, medium, low involvement with DEI.
And then so we're just focused on the raw output of what is the description of that grant and apply it from the view of is this related to DEI or the all-encompassing definition that DEI captures, DEIA, environmental justice, however Mike had described.
Plus, is this a wasteful grant?
Okay.
Got it.
And this was the description, the full-length description that the team at NEH had shared with us.
Got it.
Okay, so was there ever a point in time where you yourself were looking at a grant description and determining whether or not it should be labeled as DEI?
We gave our thoughts, certainly.
The ultimate decision came down to Mike and Adam, but yes, we were looking at it from that context.
Okay.
So just to clarify, so you yourself were looking at grants and assessing whether or not there was DEI involvement with those grants.
Is that fair to say?
As one piece of the puzzle, yes.
Right.
Okay.
And there was other aspects complaining into that, but.
Right, right.
And we ultimately deferred to Adam and Mike, but we relayed our perspectives.
You've said that a number of times, and I've understood, yeah.
Great.
I'm asking you about how you were actually assessing the grants as you privately looked at them.
Which I can ask, did you ever sit down, not with Mike and not with Adam and not with Nate, and review grants for DEI involvement on your own?
Abraction.
Yes, as one piece of the puzzle.
Okay, great.
And the same for gender ideology.
Is that fair to say?
That'd be fair.
Okay.
And economic justice, right?
That'd be fair.
Okay.
Or excuse me.
Environmental justice.
Is that fair?
What methodology did you apply when you were sitting and reviewing grants alone to determine whether something should be flagged yes or no for DEI?
Reading the description under the context of the all-encompassing definition that we've gone over about DEI, does this relate, this description, the full-length description relate to DEI, yes or no?
And again, this is only on the grants that were not flagged as having DEI involvement because the NEH team had already done weeks of work on the existing grants that are outstanding and flagged them as having DEI involvement or not.
So then our work was solely focused on those that the team did not at first pass believe related to DEI.
Those were the grants that we really spent time deliberating on and receiving input from Mike and Adam.
Okay.
I think you said earlier something about the fact that there were so many grants and so part of your job was to come in with Nate and kind of help with the general like load of work that needed to be done.
Do you remember saying something to that effect?
Abraction.
Helping Mike and Adam was the sole reason they were there.
When we got there, all of the grant reviews were in separate tabs and disorganized and so what we did was help them organize the work that their team did.
Okay.
And then you also have said that you applied your own, you reviewed grants yourself as well, right?
Okay.
Yes.
Okay.
So it wasn't just organizing work that was already done.
You were adding to the process of grant review.
Is that fair to say?
Objection.
We were helping Mike and Adam think through each of the grants that their team had not deemed related to DEI.
That was the sole purpose.
Okay.
Got it.
But you weren't just organizing work that was already done.
You were adding your own impressions to grants to mark for DEI or not DEI.
Our own impressions, yes.
Okay, great.
Let's go to the next.
Yanka, it's after one, and we've been going for quite a while.
for me, right for lunch soon.
Yeah, we can, yeah, sure.
We can break your hair.
Death record.
Time is 106 p.m.
This includes media three.
The time now is 2 p.m.
This begins media four on the record.
Hi, Justin.
So before the break, we were talking about DEI.
Do you remember that?
Yes.
Was screening grants, projects, et cetera, a directive for DEI, a directive that came from Doge?
No.
Post-Break Deposition Resumption00:09:11
From the executive order.
Okay.
And did you apply that same, did you apply those executive orders to several agencies during your time with the government?
Yes.
Okay.
Which other agencies did you apply them to?
Every agency that we went to.
Okay.
And that's the EO about DEI and the EO about gender ideology.
And the EO about initiating a Doge lead and finding optimization savings.
Great.
But those two were included in.
Included in the scope of what we were focused on.
Got it.
Who told you to apply those executive orders to your work at grants, or at agencies?
The executive orders themselves require that every agency adhere to them.
And we were there to help the agency leads implement EOs.
That was just the protocol for the small agencies team.
Who told you that part of your role would be helping to implement those EOs at the various agencies?
Nate?
Okay.
Anyone else?
The leadership team?
Josh, Stephen Hikian, Anthony Armstrong?
Did those people know that you were detailed to NEH?
Yes.
Okay.
Did you tell them that?
I can strike that.
How would they have known that you were detailed to NEH?
We were focused on all the small agencies.
We probably had the 100 agencies that we were detailed into.
So as you went through, strike that.
You testified earlier about the fact that you review grants yourself to mark for termination.
Is that right?
That's not right.
To explain why that's right.
We mark our interpretation of grants and whether or not we think it adheres, and that's we as in Nate and I, and we present that back to the agency leads who ultimately make the final decision.
But what were you marking?
Compliance with the EOs being relating to DEI or wasteful spending.
In the context that we were just talking about, the team had focused on all the DEI, and we were consolidating the list of the DEI grants that were flagged and reporting that back to Adam and Mike.
Okay.
We weren't terminating grants on the spot.
Right, yeah, I didn't mean to suggest that if that's what you understood.
What I was asking was: let me break it into its several parts.
You were reviewing grants.
Is that fair to say?
Yes.
Okay.
And you were reviewing grants for DEI, gender ideology, wasteful spending, et cetera, right?
Yes.
Okay.
But including those three specifically, right?
Plus others, but those three explicitly you were using to assess or analyze the grants.
Is that fair to say?
Yes.
Okay.
And was it your understanding while you were doing that that the grants that you marked yes for under those concepts would be teed up for later termination?
Traction.
Subject to Adam and Mike's input.
We read through all of them and explained what we felt.
Hence the column for Mike McDonald, Adam Molson to tag as keep.
Right.
Right.
I guess I'm not sure.
Procedurally.
Yeah, we'll get there.
That's not exactly the question I'm asking.
Was it your impression at the time of marking those grants that that was somewhere on the pipeline towards termination of those grants?
Did you assess them with the sense that these are grants that if I say yes, DEI, it would be moving that grant closer to eventual termination?
Fraction and deform.
Yes. Okay.
So as you were going through the grants, and again, you noted that you did private review of grants for DEI and wasteful spending, right?
Yes.
As you were doing that, what informed your understanding of whether a grant had DEI?
We applied the same definitions that were listed in the EOs that we read through and overlaid that into the context of what was the mission of this grant.
what are the outcomes, why was this awarded?
We applied that to every grant.
When you say we, who are you talking about?
Nate, me, and what I would assume the rest of the NEH team who was making a comprehensive review to align with the executive orders.
So if you were looking at a specific grant, your starting point for analyzing that grant is: does this comply or not comply with this set of EOs?
Is that fair to say?
Does this present, the way that we framed it was, does this potentially conflict with the EOs?
Okay.
If it did, Mike and Adam, this is what we think, why it conflicts.
What do you think?
So, yeah, it is.
Okay.
And as you were assessing whether or not it conflicts, can you explain kind of your mental impression?
Like, strike that.
Maybe I can ask, like, where were you doing this work, first of all, physically?
GSA?
Okay.
The GSA building?
At your desk, at the GSA building?
Yes.
Okay.
And so maybe, and I know this sounds boring, but maybe walk me through what an afternoon of reviewing grants would look like for you at GSA.
objection.
The list that I'd consolidated from Mike's team has details from EGMS and Brett Bobley and team on each grant.
Read all the details about this grant and overlay the EO's mission and what we're trying to find on top of this grant.
Okay.
Would you think it's fair to say that after looking at hundreds of these, you had synthesized some sort of kind of easier way to assess whether a grant conflicted with an EO that didn't require you to go to the EO every time and read the whole thing?
Synthesizing Executive Order Patterns00:08:40
There's definitely patterns that you can recognize.
Grants that are to different grantees that are accomplishing the same mission.
You read every one, and yes, after the sixth or seventh, hundredth one, you do start to develop pattern recognition of how each grant is infringing or not on the EOs.
Did you read everyone?
Yes.
What were some patterns that you noticed?
Promoting an LGBTQ study, stipending research on gender fluidity.
Why is, in your view, is LGBTQ DEI?
This is based on the EO discussing underrepresented minority groups of which LGBTQ is often associated with.
So in in, I guess, in synthesizing and strike that part of your synthesis of the EOs was that LGBTQ stuck out as obviously contrary to the spirit of those EOs.
Is that kind of what you're saying objection?
Not entirely?
Okay, why do you say not entirely?
Do you have a specific grant in mind?
We'll come to that, but I want to get your understanding of what you're doing day to day in canceling, in reviewing these grants, pardon me, and you were asking what again specifically about LGBTQ relationship to DEI?
Yeah, was it?
Is it fair to say that in applying this synthesized understanding of the EOs, LGBTQ grants jumped out as being contrary to the, the nature of the EOs.
Objection contrary to the nature, meaning conflicting with, conflicting with yes, potentially okay, ultimately not.
My call, okay.
What else did you think?
Was DEI anything besides LGBTQ, gender ideology race, cultural or under underrepresented cultures?
And just to be clear, marking something for DEI was a precursor to cancellation.
Objection, it informs Mike and Adam to make a decision okay, but.
But you understood your marking of a grant as DEI to be a precursor on the road to potential cancellation?
Is that fair being in conflict with an EO potentially okay?
And one of those EOs was about DEI reducing spend on DEI grants right, okay.
And so you said race underrepresented groups.
Why would you suggest that grants about those issues be terminated?
I didn't suggest it be terminated.
I only tagged their relationship to DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
With the understanding that you marking that would service a precursor, a signal to cancel those grants, right?
Objection.
Signal to review those grants.
On the road to termination, right?
Objection.
If that's what they wanted to do, yes.
Well, I'm a little confused.
Your goal with Doge was to save money, right?
Reduce the deficit and apply these EOs on the road to those goals, right?
Objection.
To assist agency heads with being in compliance with the EOs.
Part of the EOs were to find savings through reduction in spend.
Right.
Right, okay.
And so part of, we discussed this hours ago.
Part of your work was to help to identify grants for termination, right?
I'm not saying you terminated them.
I just want to be clear that we're kind of collating these things.
I'm not saying them all at once.
Part of your job was to identify grants for potential termination.
Is that fair to say?
For the review of Mike and Adam to comply with EO.
We viewed that this grant was not in compliance with the EO, ultimately it's their decision to cancel it.
And we were helping them review these grants in the context of adherence to the EO.
In the context of the grants potentially being terminated.
Relating to DEI.
Relating to DEI.
That's what we give to them: the grants that are not in compliance with the EO's mandate, ultimately their decision to terminate.
Okay.
And so you said not in compliance with the EO's mandate.
Earlier you noted that things that jumped out to you were LGBTQ plus issues, oppressed minorities, race, et cetera.
Is that fair to say?
Those stood out to me as relating to DEI.
Okay.
So would you just applying one, let's say, let's take LGBTQ.
Was it whether the author was identified as LGBTQ?
Was it whether the grant purpose was mission was about LGBTQ?
What were you assessing?
Objection.
There's a grant description and we were assessing if that had related to DEI.
Okay.
LGBTQ being one form of DEI that you've explicitly stated in the deposition, right?
A form of it.
Okay.
Race being another one.
Wasteful spending being another one.
Sure, yeah.
But race is another one too, right?
objection.
However the EO had stated it was how we interpreted it.
Okay.
But you were, you've already noted that you were synthesizing and not referring to the EO every time you looked at a new grant.
Is that fair to say?
That's fair to say.
Okay.
Abstraction and Rationale Columns00:10:38
Let's go to Tab 7
I think this will be Exhibit 8, it's
kind of small.
Can you see the text from where you're sitting?
Could you scroll up?
Oh, he can hear.
Okay, that's helpful.
Thanks.
This is US-000045132.
So I'll represent that this is the attachment that was referenced in exhibit 7 in that email from you to Mr. McDonald and Mr. Wolfson that we reviewed before the break.
Which one was that?
Which email?
The one that said the grants section bullet, and it said we reviewed all active grants for DEI involvement and marked them accordingly.
Remember that?
Yes.
Okay.
So this is the document that was attached to that email.
And if you scroll down a little bit, Jacob, oops, I'm doing the same thing.
Can you scroll down, Jacob?
Thanks.
Keep going.
Yeah, so starting on page 3 of this document and going down through page 66, there are just hundreds and hundreds of grants.
Does this look like, does this appear to be the document that you would have been referencing in that email to Mr. McDonald's?
Sorry.
This came across in the attachment.
Right.
Right.
Yes.
Okay.
But it looks like the type of thing that you were talking about in that email.
There's a.
Sorry.
Can you scroll up again, Jacob?
Yeah, keep it.
Yeah, right.
Right there is good.
There's a column all the way to the left that says yes slash no DEI question mark.
Then there's the next column is division.
The next one is number.
The next one's award number.
And then if you keep going, there's a DEI rationale.
There's the MM slash AW that I think we read earlier in one of the emails.
Does this look like it comports with your understanding of the document that was being referenced?
For that email, yes.
Yeah, okay.
Do you recognize this document?
It is one of a few that looked very similar to this.
Okay.
Did you contribute to this document?
Yes.
What did you do to contribute to this document?
At this point, I don't remember because there was a lot of back and forth between the team doing their review, Adam and Mike doing their review, and Nate and myself doing review.
I don't remember which stage this was in, frankly, because documents like this were passed throughout our interactions.
Okay.
But let's say, let's just take kind of the life of the document.
How did you contribute to it over that lifespan?
Mike and Adam gave what their team had done reviewing every outstanding grant, tagging for DEI or not.
The first thing we did was re-review the ones that had already been reviewed by the team and assessed our understanding of compliance or not with the EOs and sent that back to Adam and Mike because that's what they asked us to do.
Over the life cycle of this, and again, I don't know which stage we're looking at here, we passed it back and forth and identified the ones that were most aligned with the direction that NEH was choosing to go and in most compliance with the EOs.
Okay.
You said in the direction that NEH was willing to go?
Garden for American Heroes, elimination of wasteful spending, DEI, and adherence to the EOs.
How did you come to that understanding?
Our meetings.
With who?
Mike and Adam.
Okay.
And what exactly did they say about those focuses of NEH?
That they knew they needed to be in compliance with EOs and reduce the amount of DEI grants that they had and separate funds to go towards Garden for American Heroes and America 250 initiatives.
Garden for American Heroes.
Yes.
Statues and Garden, yeah.
Okay.
There's a column called DEI rationale.
Do you know who would have contributed to the entries in that column?
Me and Nate.
Okay.
And I think I understood you to be saying earlier that you would read the grant description and then make a judgment based on your understanding of the EOs to fill in this column.
Is that a fair recounting?
Directionally, it is.
Okay.
Anything you want to clarify about it?
Yeah.
Sure.
Part of it is framing, Assisting Adam and Mike with their review, right?
So, part of what we did was pulling in a large amount of data from different sources and putting it into something that is digestible for the team because Adam and Mike are going to review every grant, but we need to convey our thoughts about DEI rationale.
Okay.
So, how did you like any of these rationales?
How would you have actually gotten from the description to that DEI rationale in the column of that same name?
Using the grant description.
And applying a synthesized understanding of what the EO is called for.
Interpreting the grant description into the executive order context.
Okay.
So, again, you mentioned that certain concepts you saw as being contrary or conflicting with the EOs, and you named LGBTQ, race, oppressed minorities.
Do you remember that testimony?
Yes.
Abstraction.
Okay.
So, like, is it your view, or while you were doing this, was would you say it was correct to kind of state that a project that discussed an underrepresented culture,
for instance, was something that the executive orders required to be terminated?
Abstraction required to be terminated?
No.
Okay.
Is the issue with the word required?
I guess why did you repeat that particular clause?
The EOs are meant to instruct how to frame the problem.
Okay.
And eliminating wasteful spending and DEI grants was the mandate.
Okay.
OpenAI Keyword Extraction Role00:15:40
So there's 60-something pages here, thousands of grants.
Did you write all of those rationales?
Reviewed reviewing the grant description, you can extract and highlight key texts, right?
As we said, there are patterns to what is related to DEI.
It's not Garden for American Heroes.
It's typically involving underrepresented cultures and communities, race, LGBTQ.
And that informs what's written in DEI rationale.
Okay, so you didn't write those descriptions?
We edited and wrote on top of, but they pull out the key words and phrases from grant description.
What pulls out the keywords and phrases?
There's extractors that you can layer on top of Excel to grab the keywords, and then you can pull in how it frames in the context of the EO.
When you say ex okay, so what extractor did you use to pull out keywords from the Excel?
Well, Excel has a lot of native functions to pull out keywords.
You can overlay that on top of grant descriptions.
Respectfully, I'm not asking about Excel's capabilities.
I'm asking what you actually did on this spreadsheet to pull out key terms.
We used closed source aggregators that drew the context from the grant description into DEI verbiage that related to this grant.
And then over top of what was extracted, we write in additional thoughts and clarification.
What's a closed source aggregator?
Strike that.
What closed source aggregator did you use to assess these grant descriptions?
Within Excel, you're able to put in a closed-loop LLM that extracts the keywords and phrases.
What LLM did you use?
OpenAI.
That's ChatGPT?
That's the umbrella.
It wasn't ChatGVT, but it's one of the LLMs.
So you used an LLM to screen the grant descriptions for certain terms?
Yes.
Okay.
How did you come up with that list of terms?
The executive order has explanations of what is involving DEI.
Okay.
And you keyword search into the grant description to extract the keywords and phrases that match the phrases that are listed in the EO.
Okay.
Why did you use OpenAI to assess these grants rather than one by one?
We reviewed each grant, each grant, and for the sake of efficiency, pulled out the key phrases and layered on top our view of how this overlays with the EOs.
Okay.
So give me an example of a keyword that you would have LGBTQ.
Okay.
And so if a grant had LGBTQ, you would, well, I guess the model would identify that.
And then you would mark it yes for DEI?
No.
We extract the phrase and the four to five words that come before or after that keyword and adjust what's written to address why this may be related in our view to something conflicting with an EO.
Did Mr. McDonald know that you were using an LLM to assess the grant descriptions?
I'm not sure.
What about Ned Kavanaugh?
I don't know.
Did anyone instruct you to do that?
No.
So you used an LLM on your own initiative to screen thousands of grants for what the LLM perceived was DEI.
Actually, okay.
Why no?
We had to read the grant description and make our own assessment of whether this was related to DEI or not.
The DEI rationale column is only meant to contextualize it by extracting the key phrases that came up in our keyword search so that Mike and Adam, instead of having to go in each one and call us and say, grant one, why did you believe this was DEI?
And we were able to put in our rationale for each of these grants after having looked at grant description.
So you reviewed every grant yourself.
Yes.
Okay.
And you also use an LLM?
To pull out.
To pull out the keywords and phrases.
So that Mike and Adam can see what we see without needing to have them call us and explain each grant.
We put it into a digestible document and explain in the DEI column why we feel, based on the grant description, this could be related to DEI.
You keep saying we, but you just testify that Nate didn't know, you were using an LLM, that Mike McDonald didn't know, Adam Wolfson didn't know.
Who's we?
Objection.
Is the question whether or not they knew that I was writing a DEI rationale for each one?
Well, when you say we and then fill in whatever you did with the LLM, is there a we?
Who are you working with on this particular LLM project?
Yeah.
Whether Nate knew I was using an LLM or not, I'm not sure.
That's what I said.
Okay.
We were collectively pulling in DEI rationale to explain why the grant description we felt was relating to DEI.
Okay, if you had already been reviewing every grant one by one such that you gained an understanding of it, why then run all of those grants again through a large language model like OpenAI?
Objection?
I'm not sure.
You don't know?
But no one told you to.
No.
Okay.
Was this in an effort to increase efficiencies in the project?
To make sure that Mike and Adam knew what context we were reviewing this grant, individual grants.
But you knew the context because you had reviewed the grants.
Yeah.
Okay, so why do you need an LLM to tell Mike or Adam that?
We needed Mike and Adam to understand where we were coming from because it is their decision.
And instead of calling them for each grant and explaining each grant, we pulled out a DEI rationale to explain our point of view so that Mike and Adam could see our point of view.
They have the grant description themselves.
It's ultimately their judgment call.
But we were helping them review.
So the DEI rationale puts it into context for them.
Absolutely.
I understand why you might want to communicate a DEI rationale to Mike and Adam.
I don't understand why or how the involvement of OpenAI would be required to do that.
Is that a question?
Why?
Why did you use OpenAI for that purpose?
Excel functions are limited inherently by whatever you can do in Excel with formulas.
So in order to grab the phrases that we were searching for and to put it into something that we could adjust to best contextualize it for Adam and Mike, I elected for using that.
Okay.
But I read every grant description.
I could have just filled it out on my own.
So the answer is I don't know why.
Okay.
And but I guess the model was pulling out whether or not a grant description involved DEI.
Is that fair to say?
Strike that.
How do you know that your understanding of DEI was consistent with the model's understanding of DEI?
Jackson.
Because we read every grant description and adjusted DEI rationale based on our perspectives.
So the final rationales that you would have sent to Mike and Adam would be different than the rationales that were spit out by OpenAI's model?
Some of them.
Okay.
But not all of them.
Hard to say we made edits in every single one.
Okay.
Jacob, can we go down to it's row 880 in that number column?
It's going to be far down.
You might just want to drag the cursor.
Yeah.
There you go.
Very close.
There you go.
All right, it's right there.
So what we're looking at is row 880 of exhibit 8 US-000045132.
This, if you can, if you could scroll down a tiny bit, or maybe scroll up actually, just so you can see that far left column in 880.
Yep.
Do you remember the far left column being DEI question mark, yes/slash no?
We can go back up if you want, but this is the this is just what you're saying, and that the far left column is yes or no DEI.
Yeah, right.
Yes.
Okay.
So you can see in row 880 it says yes.
Yes.
Okay.
And that means that this project, in your view, did have DEI such that it conflicted with the EOs that you were applying.
Charge soldiers.
Can I read it?
Sure, yeah.
Can you zoom into that?
Just zoom in a bit so we can see the text larger, Jacob.
Okay.
So let's find 880, yep.
I can read it into the record.
For row 880, it says under the DEI rationale column, the TROF YETA's TROF YETA project aims to increase access to diverse humanities collections, which aligns with DEI goals of promoting inclusion and diverse perspectives.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes, could you scroll to the right for the project description?
Sorry, I'm yelling again.
So this is in the next column over, that's the grant description.
It says, the Troth Yeta Humanities Infrastructure Project will allow interdisciplinary humanities programs and centers currently scattered across campus to be housed under one roof to better serve students, staff, faculty, campus, and visitors.
In particular, the Alaskan Native Language Center and its archives will be showcased to increase student and public access to diverse humanities collections.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
And then we can go back to the DEI rationale column, Jacob.
Again, it says the TROF YETA project aims to increase access to diverse humanities collections, which aligns with DEI goals of promoting inclusion and diverse perspectives.
Did you write that?
Yes.
Did OpenAI write that?
Portions of it, maybe.
So tell me why this project is DEI.
Objection.
It's promoting inclusion and diverse perspectives.
What about diverse perspectives is DEI?
It's not merit-based.
diverse perspectives is not merit based.
There's just no reason for it to be.
This is involving DEI.
It is promoting through federal funding diversity, equity, and inclusion principles.
And those principles are, I see right here, promoting inclusion and diverse perspectives.
Right.
Scroll to the right.
Minority Group Promotion Analysis00:11:58
For the native Alaskan language.
Native Alaskan Language Center is archives showcased to increase students in the public.
Yeah, it is just promoting this language center and the archives.
What's wrong?
For the sake of diversity.
What's wrong with promoting a language center?
Objection.
It's wasteful, non-critical spend.
But do you have a DEI rationale there?
Objection.
It is DEI.
Just explain why it was DEI, because you're promoting a subset, Alaskan Native Language Center, and the archives to promote diverse perspectives.
A subset of what?
You said you're promoting a subset.
What does that mean?
A minority group.
Okay, so a project that promotes a minority group would be conflicting with your interpretation of the EOs?
Objection.
Is that fair to say?
It's subjective.
Subjective based on what?
It's all based on the interpretation of each grant and the details of it.
You can't overgeneralize a statement like that.
Your interpretation of the grants.
It depends on the grant.
Based on your interpretation of those grants.
Is that fair to say?
Objection.
Through the lens of applying the EO's language.
Right.
But you ultimately decided how you would apply the EO's language to these grant descriptions, right?
Ultimately, I made the effort to overlay the way that the EO was written with the grant descriptions.
And whether they conflicted or not is ultimately the decision for Adam and Mike.
How did you deal with edge cases?
Let me take a step back.
Were there ever descriptions that you said this might be DEI, it might not?
I don't really know.
Or was it always clear?
Not always clear with DEI, but the context of wasteful spending is a fairly clear way to delineate the grants.
Would you say that spending on DEI is innately wasteful?
It depends.
When you were assessing this Alaskan language project for DEI, it was on the basis that it promoted a minority group?
Is that fair?
A minority culture.
Okay.
Minority group.
Okay.
I suppose, sir, I guess what's a majority culture?
I'm not sure.
Okay.
Did you ever screen anything for majority cultures?
In what context?
Well, I guess, what's a minority?
In this context.
Which context?
This grant?
Are you analyzing all of these grants for DEI or conflicts with the EOs?
Fully depends on the grants.
Okay.
When you say it fully depends on the grant, is what you're saying that you would have to read the grant to determine, based on the system that you were applying, whether or not that grant was promoting DEI?
Yes.
Okay.
So let's go now, Jacob, to row 252.
Okay, so we're in row 252 of the same document.
Can you read what's in the first column that was yes or no DEI into the record?
Yes.
It says yes in that column, right?
Yes.
Okay.
And then the DEI rationale in the column of the same name says the documentary addresses gender-based violence and overlooked histories contributing to DEI by amplifying marginalized voices.
Is gender.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
Is gender-based violence DEI?
Could I see the full grant description?
Sure, but I guess that's a question that has nothing to do with what's in the next column.
Just like, is gender-based violence?
You need to allow him to read the document.
Well, I'm asking him to answer your question.
No, he gets to read the entire exhibit.
This is how dissertations work.
So if he says he needs to see part of it, you need to let him see part of it.
Okay, Council, just for the record, let me say this pretty clearly.
So I'm sure you've been in cases where there are 100 or 1,000 page contracts that need to be submitted in full.
I'm sure that you're not implying that every witness needs to read every page of a contract if they're not.
I'm saying if he asks to read something, you have to let him read it.
And you're trying to prevent him from doing that.
I don't know why, but if he says to read it, let him read it.
Right.
Okay.
Go ahead and read it, please.
Which one was it?
Jacob?
Sorry.
252, right there.
I can read it into the record.
The grant description of column, or row 252 says, production of My Underground Mother, a feature-length documentary that explores the untold story of Jewish women's slave labor during the Holocaust through a daughter's search for her late mother's past.
A collective camp diary in which she wrote and interviews with dozens of women survivors who reveal the gender-based violence they suffered and hid from their own families.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
Okay.
And then in that row or column, you say yes, DEI.
Did you write the rationale in that column?
Can you scroll over, Jacob?
Again, the rationale says, the documentary addresses gender-based violence and overlooked histories contributing to DEI by amplifying marginalized voices.
Yes.
Why is a documentary about Holocaust survivors DEI?
Objection.
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 gender-based, so females during the Holocaust.
And you believe that that's inherently discriminatory?
I'm just saying that's what it's focused on.
Sure.
And this is related to DEI.
Right.
But you just used the term inherently discriminatory.
What did you mean by that?
It's focusing on DEI principles, gender being one of them.
So a documentary that's about women would be DEI.
Objection.
Is that fair to say?
No.
Okay.
So tell me why what I just said isn't DEI, but what you just said is DEI.
Objection.
It's a Jewish, specifically focused on Jewish cultures and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture.
It's inherently related to DEI for those reasons.
Okay.
Because it's about Jewish culture.
Plus marginalized female voices during the Holocaust, gender-based violence.
Okay.
Is this when we focus on a minority?
Is it your understanding that the Jewish people fall into the category of a minority?
Certainly a culture that could be described as minorities.
Okay.
Holocaust Grant Assessment Criteria00:07:39
So how did you go about determining what was a minority and what wasn't a minority for the purpose of identifying DEI in grants?
Inherently focused on any ethnicity, culture, gender, no matter the sort of race or gender or religion or yeah.
Okay.
And you said that your understanding of the purpose of marking these grants for DEI was eventual possible termination, right?
Objection.
For Mike and Adam.
To make a judgment about termination.
To see how we felt this did or did not comply with DEI involvement from the perspective of the EOs.
Okay.
With the ultimate goal of assessing which grants needed to be terminated, right?
Helping Adam and Mike review comprehensively the grants adherence to existing EOs that existed.
And if they did not comply with EOs, those grants presumably would be terminated, right?
Objection.
Up to Mike and Adam.
Was it your understanding that the goal of this review was to understand which grants would be kept versus which grants would be terminated?
Certainly to understand where they landed in the scope of do they adhere to the EO or do they not?
And if they didn't adhere to the EO, those are grants that would be more likely to be terminated.
Is that fair to say?
That's what the EO wanted, was to find savings in the buckets that they identified.
Ultimately, Adam and Mike made that call.
I'm not asking who made the call.
I'm asking for your understanding of what would happen to grants that were marked with DEI.
Was it your understanding that these grants were being isolated as grants to terminate?
To be compliant with the EO.
Yes.
Yes, to terminate in order to be compliant with the EO.
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah, I mean, we just needed Mike and Adam to see which grants and why related to DEI.
And as you've said, ultimately the call was their judgment to make.
But the intention is to find savings, redirect funds to America First Priorities Garden for Heroes.
DEI is one of the buckets we screen for, as well as wasteful spending.
Yeah.
I just want to be clear.
You know we're going to be talking to several others at NEH as part of this lawsuit and other people that are members of the Doge teams that you've been discussing.
Objection.
Are you aware of that?
Well, I guess to answer your previous question, I don't know who else you're interviewing from NEH, and I don't know anybody else outside of Nate.
Did you know that we were going to talk to Mr. McDonald?
I don't know.
Okay.
You don't know.
We will be talking to Mr. McDonald.
We'll be talking to Mr. Wolfson.
We've already spoken with Nate, as you know.
Do you think all of them would agree with your framing here that strike that?
Would they think that part of this review was being done to tee grants up for termination?
Objection.
Who do you mean they?
Mr. Wolfson, Mr. Kavanaugh, Mr. McDonald.
I don't know.
Did you discuss terminating grants that were related to DEI?
Yes.
Okay.
Did you discuss terminating grants because they related to DEI?
To align with the EO, yeah.
Okay.
And so when you mark, for instance, this grant about the Holocaust as DEI, was it your understanding that that would make it more likely that that grant would be terminated?
Roger, you're under oath.
I mean, and we're going to talk to others.
Objection.
Yes.
Okay.
And so based on your judgment here, you believed a grant about women during the Holocaust that were subject to gender-based violence, a documentary about that should be shortlisted for termination at the NEH?
Objection.
Which one?
grant 252 the one that we've been talking about we were it's just it's a yes or no presenting it to mike and adam That doesn't answer my question.
Under the context of does this comply or does this not?
And this is the rationale that we give for whether we believe it complied or not or related to DEI in any capacity.
Right.
But the first column is yes or no.
Yep.
Okay.
So you're saying yes, it has DEI or no, it doesn't have DEI, and that's the very first column of the spreadsheet.
Is that right?
Yes.
Okay.
And you put yes in the first column with respect to this grant about the Holocaust.
Is it your understanding that grants marked yes for DEI, Mr. McDonald and Ms. Wolfson, would have viewed us more likely to terminate based on DEI grounds and EO grounds?
We were helping them.
That doesn't matter.
So it's fair to assume that they would think that.
Thank you.
Let's go to well actually, I think we could take a go off the record.
Sure.
Take a five-minute break.
Is that cool?
Time is 3.04 p.m. and it concludes media 4 off the record.
Time now is 3.13 p.m. and it begins media 5 on the record.
Hello again.
Racial Minority Identification Factors00:16:26
Part of your analysis of whether a grant was related to DEI was whether or not it referenced racial minorities.
Is that fair to say?
Part of it.
How did you ascertain what a racial minority was?
Whether it was focused on any specific race in any capacity.
Right, so racial minority is probably where we're missing.
Okay.
Having to do with race and diversity of race, minority or not, is related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Okay.
But doesn't everyone, to some degree, have a race?
Yes.
Okay.
So you were canceling grants based on whether they had to do with strike that.
I guess how did you make the distinction between whether a grant should be terminated based on the fact that it involves a minority or not?
It would be based on the grant description for each grant.
But this kind of system that you are using to analyze that, walk me through it.
Objection.
Read through the grant, identify keywords that may relate to DEI, and give context as to why this may relate to DEI so that Adam and Mike can review our perspective.
So if a grant said, for instance, a history of Michael Jordan versus a history of black former NBA player Michael Jordan, would that make a difference in the way that you analyze the grant?
Objection.
That would depend on the grant and the full context of the description.
Sure.
Would the word black by itself have in the system you were applying in your DEI review have led you to mark that grant as being a DEI?
Objection.
Being DEI.
Objection.
Sorry?
It would depend on the grant.
Okay.
So sitting here today, you can't answer that example, for instance.
Conjunction.
Well, it would need to be a grant that we were reviewing in the full context.
Yeah.
Okay, we'll look at more grants.
Let's go to tab eight.
This will be exhibit nine.
Excuse me.
Sorry, I think I got that wrong.
tab nine which will be exhibit nine i think
no i guess then this should be tab eight Sorry about that.
And this will be, I believe, an Excel sheet, not a PDF.
Well, he pulls it up.
I'll have a couple more questions for you.
When you say it depends on the grant, is what you're saying that it depends on how you interpreted the grant during your review?
For what?
This is the full question there.
Sorry.
Well, yeah, could you restate the question?
Yeah, I'll give the full context.
I believe you testified earlier that it would depend on what the grant says when I asked whether you would say it was DEI or not.
Do you remember that?
Yes.
Did it also depend on how you personally interpreted that grant?
for the rationale and our view of its relation to DEI.
Yes.
Okay.
Sorry, Jacob.
Are you able to find that tab eight?
Yep, that's the one. Thank you.
So this is US-000062485.
I'll represent to you that you're the custodian of this document, meaning that it was produced to us from your possession, presumed your GSA computer.
Does this document look familiar to you?
And I'm happy to scroll in or ask Jacob to manipulate it anyway.
I need to see it.
Yes, this looks familiar.
Okay.
Can you describe what this is?
This is a way to assist contextualizing, summarizing, really, relation to DEI.
Okay.
And it was used to inform the rationale piece of the broader grant view.
Okay.
Let's go a bit broader than that.
So, just to fully paint the picture, what's on the spreadsheet?
It pulls out the key phrases and words and context from the description as its relation to DEI.
The grant description.
The grant description.
Okay.
And did you create this document?
Yes.
Okay.
Did anyone help you to create this document?
No.
Okay.
Can we go to table five?
That's the first tab there on the left side, Jacob.
No, if you just go left with your mouse, there are several little tabs.
Table 5, invoke function, sheet 1, yep.
There we go.
Okay.
Does this look familiar?
Yes.
Okay.
Did you create this sheet?
Yes.
Can you briefly tell me the context for creating this document?
To look at the grant descriptions, the full grant descriptions, and bring out the context of which a DEI grant may relate, or a grant may relate to DEI.
And it was used to inform DEI rationale.
And cell B1 says GPT response.
Do you see that?
Yes.
So when you say pull out, you mean run the grant description through ChatGPT to pull out a DEI rationale?
To highlight why this grant may relate to DEI, which we used to give context to Adam and Mike on why this grant may be related to DEI.
How did you ensure that GPT would know what did or did not relate to DEI?
Objection.
Well, we read the responses and adjusted based on the EOs.
Okay, so it says, sorry, just to look at one brief example, cell 2A or A2, it starts by saying, from 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, quote, this initiative, close quote, or quote, this description, close quote, in your response.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
And that's the command for ChatGPT.
Is that right?
Yes.
And then after that, you would put the grant description into ChatGPT for ChatGPT to analyze.
Is that right?
Again, to inform the rationale for why this may relate to DEI.
And that was then used on top of what we understood from the grant description ourselves to be sent to Adam and Mike in a consolidated format.
What's your understanding of how the model understood the word D-E-I?
I don't know.
Did you do anything to teach the model what DEI meant as you used it in this command?
We didn't need to because we were adjusting and making the call ultimately based on the full description, whether this was DEI or not.
This was only a tool to assist in contextualizing.
It was not the decision-making factor.
Did you use this tool for every grant that you reviewed?
Not the ones that the NEH team had already deemed relating to DEI.
Okay.
But the thousands that you reviewed personally, you used this process?
Again, to help with the contextualizing of it to Mike and Adam, to pull out the key phrases of which this may relate to DEI.
To assist in that step of the process, which is consolidating the points.
And we could have gone in and written our own summaries.
And that's why this is only a tool and it didn't end up with the final decisions, yes or no.
Did you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT's conception of DEI as applied here wouldn't discriminate on the basis of race?
Objection. No.
Did you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT's conception of DEI in this in this task that you gave to ChatGPT would strike up.
Do you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT's perception of DEI as applied here wouldn't discriminate on the basis of sex?
Objection.
It didn't matter because, again, this was not the ultimate decision-making factor.
But that doesn't answer my question.
Did you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT's description, perception of DEI as applied here wouldn't discriminate on the basis of sex?
Objection.
I didn't need to.
This was not the decision-making factor.
But I'm not asking whether you needed to or not.
I'm asking whether you did or not.
Objection.
This is a rephrasing of the previous question.
What is it that you're referring to now, like specifically?
Did you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT's perception of DEI as applied here wouldn't discriminate on the basis of sex?
Objection.
It's a yes or no.
This is just to identify phrases that may relate to DEI to assist in our population of giving context to Adam and Mike as they're reviewing.
And this was not the ultimate decision-making factor.
Did you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT's perception of DEI as applied here wouldn't discriminate on the basis of sex?
I'd like an answer to my question eventually.
I'll keep asking you.
It didn't matter.
Objection.
Did you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT's perception of DEI supplied here wouldn't discriminate on the basis of sex?
Objection.
Aston answered several times.
It didn't matter.
We didn't need to.
Is that yes or no?
Objection.
Is what yes or no?
Did you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT's perception of DEI as applied here wouldn't discriminate on the basis of sex?
Objection.
The task was to pull out anything related to DEI.
There was no reason to check for discrimination.
So you didn't do it?
ChatGPT Usage Objections00:10:26
Objection.
We did not need to.
Did you do it or not?
Objection.
This was a medium step in between getting the consolidated list to Adam and Mike for review.
I'm sorry, Justin.
We could keep doing this.
I'm asking you for, I'm entitled to an answer to my question, as posed.
I'm not asking you about Michael McDonald or Adam Wilson.
I'm not asking you about how many other iterative steps it took to the terminations.
I'm asking this question.
Did you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT's perception of DEI supplied here wouldn't discriminate on the basis of sex?
Objection.
There was no need to do that because this was only an intermediary step.
So because there was no need, did you not do it?
action.
I'll inform you that it's possible the Finder of Fact will watch this and read this transcript.
Uh-huh.
I would suggest being straightforward.
Of course, that's your choice.
That isn't appropriate.
First of all, just because you say the answer is yes or no does not mean that every answer is yes or no.
He has given you an answer many, many times.
Frankly, I don't think your question even makes sense.
You can't keep asking a witness the same question time after time.
This is becoming harassing.
Okay.
I would just put into the record that counsel's statement there is partially coaching the witness.
So again, I'd ask that you keep your objections to former founders.
It's not coaching the witness.
I appreciate that counsel.
You are proceeding in an inappropriate manner.
I appreciate counsel.
You're clearly coaching the witness, and if we need to go to the court about this, we will.
Okay, feel free to call the court.
I have not done anything remotely inappropriate.
And you are doing something inappropriate.
In your estimation.
Thank you.
Okay.
Hi, Justin.
Did you do anything to ensure that Chat GPT that you were using to assess grants for DEI would not discriminate on the basis of sex or religion?
Objection.
We did not need to.
So you're refusing to answer the question?
Objection.
It's a yes or no question.
I'm telling you, we did not need to do this because we're just identifying whether it involves DEI.
Right.
And again, I'm not asking you what you needed to do or what you didn't need to do.
I'm asking whether or not factually you did something and you're refusing to give me an answer.
Factual question.
Factually speaking, did you do anything yourself to ensure that the model here would not discriminate on the basis of sex?
Objection.
We did not need to.
Okay.
Thank you, Justin.
So I'll mark for the record that the witness is refusing to answer this question.
And we can move on, I guess.
And I'll note that he has answered the question.
Did you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT's perception of DEI is applied when discriminated on the basis of religion?
Objection.
We did not need to do that.
Did you teach this model anything about the meaning of DEI or how it should be applied?
The prompt is from the perspective of someone looking to identify DEI grants.
So just extract the key phrases that may relate to DEI.
And again, this just informed how we were synthesizing a perspective to share with Mike and Adam.
Not the ultimate decisions from Mike and Adam.
Did you use ChatGPT during any other work while at the government?
Sometimes.
For similar projects?
For some, not all.
If someone were to say that you didn't use ChatGPT or LLMs in your analysis of grants while at NEH, would that be false?
Objection.
To analyze the grants, we were using just the descriptions in its entirety.
That's what informed giving it back to Adam and Mike.
And this is just an intermediary step to synthesize the key phrases that may relate to TEI.
Ultimate decisions?
No.
No, but I'm sorry.
If someone were to say that you didn't use ChatGPT in your work related to NEH, would that be false?
Objection.
Could you just rephrase?
Because I think double negative threw me off there.
If someone made the representation that you did not use ChatGPT in relation to your work at NEH, would that be false?
Objection.
It would depend on the context.
You did use ChatGPT in relation to your work at NEH, right?
Here?
For the initimary step?
Yes.
Okay.
And if someone implied that you didn't do this, that would be false, right?
Objection.
Didn't do this for what?
Didn't use ChatGPT in the way that you did on this screen.
In any capacity?
It was used to assist Mike and Adam's understanding of where we were coming from as grants related to DEI.
That doesn't even come close to answering my question.
If someone said that you didn't use ChatGPT in relation to your work with NEH, would that be a falsity or a truth?
objection?
It would depend on the context.
Okay.
What context would it be true?
Whether it's making decisions on granting terminations or not, or intermediary steps.
Any at all.
Objection to form.
Any at all full question?
If someone said that you didn't use ChatGPT in relation to your work at NEH in any capacity, would that be false?
Yes.
Hey, Jacob, could you go to sheet two?
I think it's the fourth tab.
Do you recognize this tab, Justin?
As separate and distinct from the other tabs?
No?
Okay.
So this tab has, I think, two columns.
And, you know, I can read an example of what's in column one.
There's a command for each one of these entries on the page that says, does the following relate at all to DEI?
Respond factually in less than 120 characters, begin with yes or no, followed by a brief explanation.
Do not use this initiative or this description in your response.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
Okay.
And in cell A3, if you could zoom up a bit, Jacob.
Or scroll up.
Sorry.
So if we could look at A3.
Could you zoom in too?
That's kind of small for me to see.
Okay.
So cell three says, Jacob, could you actually go to the line between two and three and pull it down so you could see the full text?
There's like, yeah, if you could go over, there's a line.
Yeah, so I want to make that, I want to make that one bigger.
Actually, I think that's the right size.
No, that's the right size.
Okay.
So this here says, this is cell A3 again.
Anti-Black Violence Project Review00:07:14
It says, does the following relate at all to DEI?
Respond factually in less than 120 characters.
Begin with yes or no, followed by a brief explanation.
Do not use this initiative or this description in your response.
The documentary tells the story of the Colfax massacre, the single greatest incident of anti-black violence during Reconstruction, and its historical and legacy for black civil rights in Louisiana, the South, and in the nation as a whole.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
Okay.
And then in column B, right next to that, it says, yes, the documentary explores a historical event that significantly impacted black civil rights, making it relevant to the topic of DEI.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
Is it fair to say that that's what I just read is the ChatGPT output of the prompt in the first column?
Yes.
Okay.
Do you agree with ChatGPT's assessment here that a documentary is DEI if it explores historical events that significantly impacted black civil rights?
Yes.
Okay.
Why would that be DEI?
It's focused on a singular race.
It is not for the benefit of humankind.
It is focused on a specific group of or a specific race here being black.
Why would learning about anti-black violence not be to the benefit of humankind?
Objection.
That's not what I'm saying.
Okay, then what are you saying?
I'm saying it relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
You said it's not to the benefit of humankind.
Right?
Is that what I said?
Yeah.
Did you read back the witness's response about benefits to humankind?
Question, why would that be DEI?
Answer.
It's focusing on a singular race.
It is not for the benefit of humankind.
It is focused on a specific group or a specific race here being black.
So what do you mean by not for the benefit of humankind?
That's a very subjective.
The way that I phrased it there wasn't exactly what I meant.
It is focused on a specific subset of race, and therefore it relates to DEI.
Okay.
I'm not suggesting that this is not for the betterment of humankind.
That was a misphrasing.
Okay, so is it your understanding that the actual massacre was an event of anti-black violence?
Rejection.
What do you mean?
Like, I guess I'm trying to distinguish between the facts of the massacre itself, the historical event, versus how it's written here.
There was, at least in the description here, a massacre that seems to have been in some ways anti-black or against black people.
Is that your understanding of it by reading this?
Could you zoom in?
Okay, what was the question?
Is it your understanding that the historical event itself, the Colfax massacre, was an event that featured anti-black violence?
What do you mean by featured?
That there was anti-black violence exercised during the Colfax massacre.
Yes.
Okay.
And so you're not disputing whether this was a real event, are you?
No.
Okay.
So if anti-black violence was a real feature of a real historical event, what about this project is DEI?
because it focuses on exclusively anti-black violence, which is a race.
So because the massacre is at the Colfax massacre decided to kill only black people, there should be no this project should be marked for DEI and put on a potential list for termination.
The same as it would be in anti-white violence during Reconstruction, as it's a race that you're isolating and it relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
So in the exercise of your role with the Doge and looking at these grants, any historical event that would have been featuring one particular race would be marked for DEI, in your view?
Is that fair to say?
It would depend on the grant.
Nate Kavanaugh Interpretation Notes00:12:12
Okay.
But that was one factor that you analyzed, whether the event itself had to do with a specific race or gender to identify if it related or could have related at all to DEI and the EOs.
Jacob, can you pull up tab 10?
Sorry, tab 10.
Yes, that's the second thing.
Yeah, I think so.
Okay, so this is document NEH underscore AR underscore zero zero zero zero two four.
Do you recognize this document?
Was there an email associated with this being sent?
It was, yeah.
Actually, just because of how the logistics are set up here, I'll skip over this.
We haven't really gotten to it yet.
We'll come back to it, but so this is exhibit 10.
I'll now go to tab 11, Jacob.
This will be Exhibit 11.
This is going to be an email, but not the email that you just asked for.
It's FYI.
It's a different email.
Just don't want to confuse anyone.
Okay, this is Exhibit 11, Bates number US-000016153.
Very short.
It's from JustinFox at gsa.gov to jfox at neh.gov.
Subject crazy grants.
Did I read that all correctly?
Yes.
Okay.
So this is an email from your GSA email to your NEH email.
Is that fair to say?
Yes.
Okay.
And you had emails at both?
Do you remember why you sent this email to yourself?
April 3rd.
No.
I don't.
Did you typically send emails between your NEH and your GSA accounts?
Not often, from what I remember.
In what circumstance might you have done that?
Work done on my GSA that needed to go and be continued to work on for my NEH laptop.
Okay.
Do you think that might have been what was happening here?
Maybe.
Okay.
Any other reasons you could think of?
For this single email, I don't know.
Okay, we can move on to well, before we do that.
It says crazy grants.
Do you see that?
Yes.
Did you write that?
Yes.
Okay.
Do you know what that means?
I don't remember.
You don't remember what crazy grants means?
I don't remember what it meant in the context of this attachment.
Okay, well, we can open the attachment.
This is tap 12, Jacob, exhibit 12.
It's going to be Bates number US-000016154.
So this is the document that you sent to yourself on April 3rd, 2025 in an email subject, Crazy Grants.
Does this look familiar to you?
Yes.
Okay.
Is this a document that you created?
That I edited from grants.gov.
Yes.
So, but sorry, several parts there.
Did you get this document from grants.gov directly and then kind of work within it?
Yes.
Okay.
So no single person sent you this document.
Is that fair to say?
This?
No.
Okay.
So.
From what I remember, this no.
Okay.
Can you describe what it is?
From what I remember, all outstanding grants for NEH with the obligated dollars outlaid and the remaining amount, along with, on the right, all of the descriptions about the recipient and the description of the project.
I don't remember what else is on the right.
If you wouldn't mind scrolling over.
Jacob, we're going to be scrolling to the right quickly for the witness.
Thank you.
Does that comport with your understanding of?
Yeah.
Okay.
We can scroll back to the left now, Jacob.
Did someone tell you to put this document together?
Not that I remember.
So you did this on your own volition?
Ahead of meeting with Mike and Adam in our first meeting.
We were identifying areas to discuss with them about compliance with the EO and to make sure we had discussion points to talk with Adam and Mike about, did our own sort of condensed review of what was publicly available on NEH's grants.
When you say our, who are you referring to?
Nate and myself.
Okay.
Was it your idea to do this or Nate's idea to do this?
This was just what we did for meetings that we had coming up was do a review of the publicly available grants and assess their adherence to the existing EOs.
Okay.
So there are several grants In this document with shorted descriptions under column E that say things like understanding historical LGBTQ spaces through gay travel guides, for instance.
That's cell E12.
Do you see that?
Yes.
Okay.
I think you actually referenced this project at the very, very beginning of the deposition.
Do you remember that?
Yes.
Okay.
And you said that that was obviously DEI or something earlier.
Yes.
Okay.
Here you're calling it among the craziest grants.
Is that a fair kind of summary of by looking at this document?
A summary of.
Like is that what this is that what the placement of that grant in this section means that you consider it to be one of the craziest grants?
From the lens of adherence to the EOs, crazy is one way of saying it, most incriminating is another way.
The most blatantly misaligned with the latest EOs to our understanding.
And this is a very preliminary exercise, again, to address the initial meeting with Mike and Adam.
Right.
But you sent it to yourself on April 2nd.
Yeah.
And your initial meeting with Mike and Adam Wolfson, I think, was much earlier on March 12th.
Yeah, this document should be saved exactly around the time that we met with Adam and Mike.
I don't remember why I'd sent it from my GSA to my NEH at that time, but I know that this document was formed immediately or right before we had that first interaction with Mike and Adam.
So why do you label these the craziest grants?
They're the most obviously infringing on the EOs to identify and eliminate wasteful spend or DEI-related projects.
Yeah.
You say most obviously.
Identifying Craziest Grants List00:04:26
Most obviously based on your point of view.
Is that fair to say?
Our interpretation of the EOs.
You and Nate's interpretation of the EOs.
Yes.
And that's how you assessed what grants were crazy and what grants weren't crazy.
Is that fair?
That's how we assessed whether or not a grant would be most infringing or not on the EOs.
Your subjective interpretation.
Yes.
Okay.
So let's look at some of these.
In row 12, cell C, or excuse me, cell E, we already read it.
It says understanding historical LGBTQ spaces through gay travel guides.
In row 11, cell E, it says improving access to LGBTQ plus cultural heritage.
In row 11, cell D, it says developing a Spanish language homosaurus.
If we scroll down a bit, Jacob, we'll see in row 32, in row 32, it says, quote, digital stories of transgender adults in the Pacific Northwest.
In row 16, if we scroll up a bit, it says examining the relationship between the internet and the LGBTQ communities.
Did I generally read all those correctly?
Yes, okay.
So, why, for instance, is, to your view, improving access to LGBTQ Plus cultural heritage DEI.
Which one is that?
Row 11.
Could I see the full description?
Yeah, can you scroll over Jacob, to column F?
Yeah, I believe it's.
It's truncated here.
If you could click on that cell.
Which one's this?
11.
F11.
I still can't read all of it.
If you press the down button on the in the bar, or or or make the row bigger yeah, if you, if you no, if you drag down, if you go to 11 right below 11, where the 11 turns into 12, and click on that line and drag it downwards, it should expand.
Yep, just like that.
There you go.
Great, keep going until all the text is visible Jacob, thank you, if you could zoom in just as well.
Um, this is, uh, this is the homosaurus one.
Preliminary Search Vocabulary Lists00:14:12
Yeah, I think so, I guess.
Yeah, I guess you could do the same assessment here.
So this is funding to create a Spanish version of LGBTQ plus vocabulary.
Okay.
And it looks like in the next column over strike that, and that's what makes it DEI.
Is that what you're saying?
It's spend to create vocabulary for just LGBTQ words for the benefit of the LGBTQ community or Q community.
Okay.
And it was your understanding that grants like this should not continue based on the DEI principle?
That they were related to DEI.
Yes.
Okay.
And in the next column, it says LGBTQ comma queer.
Do you see that?
Yes.
Okay.
And then above that, it says indigenous in G10.
Below that it says LGBTQ comma gay in G cell G11.
These look like keywords.
Is that right?
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
Did you use keywords to identify certain concepts and grant descriptions in this document?
For this document, again, the preliminary work that we were doing before meeting Adam and Mike was to find grants that were not aligned with the EOS.
Okay.
So can we go to the third tab there, Jacob?
It says detection list in this same spreadsheet at the bottom.
Okay.
You could take a second to review that.
Do you zoom in, Jacob?
Do you have an understanding of what this list is?
A list of words or phrases that may relate to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Okay.
So you said that you and Nate were prepared this in preparation for meeting with Mr. McDonald and Mr. Wolfson for the first time?
Yes.
Okay.
So how would you have determined that this would be at all useful to Mr. McDonald and Mr. Wolfson before you even met with them?
Jackson?
The EOs made it clear that funding to DEI programs needed to be terminated in the timeframe, I think it was 60 days from the time it dropped.
And we were there to assist them.
In any way we could, and part of what we thought would be helpful is to think through the existing base of grants.
Which of these may infringe with the direction of EOs?
Okay, and you had done that thinking in the lead up to your first meeting with Mr. Wolfson and Mr. Kavanaugh, or, excuse me, Mr. Wolfson or Mr. McDonald's, is that right?
Yes okay, was this in the context of helping mr. Mr. McDonald and Mr. Wolfson identify grants to terminate?
Not at this point.
So we'll...
This was to assess whether they were even aware of some of the grants that they had outstanding and whether they may conflict with EO priorities.
Okay, but this is all under the context of possibly terminating grants.
Is that fair to say?
Identifying grants that may relate or can conflict with EOs?
Okay, was there any world in which you were?
You saw your goal as being identifying grants that had to do with DEI in order to ensure that you preserve all of those grants through the end of their terms projection.
Could you restate?
Were you flagging these grants in order to to save them?
We were flagging them because they may conflict with the EOs.
Okay, and what would happen to grants that conflict with the EOs?
The heads of agencies would need to assess if they were in line with the executive orders.
How did you come up with this list?
I don't remember it's got LGBTQ on a homosexual, tribal immigrants, immigrant.
So it was your assessment that immigrant would have been contrary to the EOs.
It depends on the grant.
But you put it on this list because at some point you thought that a word like immigrant might conflict with the EOs.
It may, but it all depends on the grant.
Yeah, but that is that why you put this word on the list, though it could indicate DEI.
It's not hamburger, it's something that may relate to cultural, cultural appropriation and DEI related grants.
Okay, You also put the word refugees, that's C25.
Is there something about refugees that invokes DEI principles?
Maybe.
It depends on the grant.
Okay.
But you were using this list of flag grants for potential DEI?
Is that fair to say?
Or wasteful spend.
Right.
So would you say that spend on LGBTQ was wasteful?
That would depend entirely on the grant and the specifics of that grant.
Well, you say or wasteful spend, but what about these words would imply wasteful spend?
Well, they may not be a life or death award.
For something like food stamps, it's clear you need spend to go to those.
They're critical spend expenditures to the government.
Again, all depends on the grant itself.
Okay.
And you put on here homosexual.
I don't see heterosexual, though.
You can confirm or deny.
Could you scroll down?
Very well could have put heterosexual, but not on this list.
It's not on this list.
Don't know why I didn't put heterosexual, but it is not on this list.
Do you see white on this list?
I see privilege.
Do you see white on this list?
Could you scroll back up?
Okay.
What about Caucasian?
Was that on the list?
No.
Okay.
So you can see that there is gay, LGBTQ plus, homosexual on this list, right?
Yes.
Okay, but there's no heterosexual on this list, right?
Very well could have put heterosexual, although this list does not capture everything that is DEI.
Again, this is a preliminary search.
Got it.
And we can see that it says black, Indigenous, people of color on this list, right?
Yes.
It doesn't say white or Caucasian on this list, does it?
It very well could have.
Again, this is an early before we had our meetings, and it all depends on the grant itself.
Did you ever correct that by putting white or Caucasian on any lists that you used to screen for DEI?
I didn't need to, because we read the grants themselves.
So you were using Chat GPT to screen grants using keywords And that screening didn't have white heterosexual Caucasian on it.
Is that fair?
This list was not used in the context of deciding which grants to keep or not.
This list was preemptive and not the source of truth.
So this is from a publicly available site called grants.gov grants.gov is where you can download any grant but it's not up to date and it doesn't give you the best information in terms of description.
So what we did after we met and talked with Mike and Adam is can we get details from EGMS and have the full list that you guys have which is the latest up to date so that we can properly assess alongside you.
Okay got it.
So this is this got thrown out frankly after the first meeting when Adam had sent me the file that you showed me which is here's our active grants.
Okay.
So this list was not used in determining which grants to keep or not?
No.
Okay.
But a future list that you created was used in that way.
In what way?
In determining which grants to keep or not.
In determining which grants related or may have related to DEI or not?
Yes.
For the purposes of keeping or not keeping those grants at the agency?
For the purposes of identifying if this may conflict with DEI.
Okay.
Number 49 says melting pot.
Why would that be DEI?
I guess it's melting pot, I assume, of cultures is the way that the context could be used.
So it's promoting an inclusion atmosphere or something that's DEI related.
Again, did not use this as the source of truth.
This was the initial publicly available research for a jumping off point to talk with Mike and Adam.
Right.
Melting Pot Context Assessment00:03:39
But you did put this together, right?
Yes.
Okay.
I don't remember where.
And this does reflect your understanding of what the EOs would have conflicted with, right?
Not necessarily.
This was the initial take of which grants may be conflicting, but not necessarily prescriptive as to here's the only 55 terms that we would use to assess whether or not a grant is related to DEI or wasteful for that matter.
Sure.
Preliminary list, this got thrown out.
Sure, yeah.
But would you agree, at least, that this list captures at least a moment of your perception of what the EOs were calling for in analyzing grants?
This list helped us identify which grants we needed to read, but not make the ultimate yay or nay decision on whether we keep this grant or not.
Okay.
But this is subjective, right?
What is the terms that you picked?
Why you picked one term versus another term?
This was a subjective call by you and Mr. Kavanaugh, right?
Yes.
Okay.
And the DEI rationales that we saw in previous spreadsheets, those are also subjective calls about how DEI and the EOs would apply to certain grant descriptions, right?
Yes.
Okay, let's
go off the record for.
Okay.
Council think it's going to be 421 p.m. conclusive media five off the record.
Time is 4.32 p.m. and Speakers Media 6 on the record.
Hi there.
I think we were, Jacob, I think we were looking at exhibit 12.
This is U.S. 000016154.
Thanks.
And if you could go back to the first tab on this document, it's called NEH grants in parentheses, JF, close parentheses.
Yeah.
Text Message Exhibit Examination00:03:02
And maybe zoom out a bit so that we could see more of the document.
Thanks.
And then to the right, or excuse me, scroll to the left, please.
Thank you.
Okay, so Justin, again, these are what you're testifying that you and Nate put together in the lead up to your initial meeting with Mr. Wolfson and Mr. McDonald.
Yes.
Okay.
Did you actually show Mr. Wolfson and Mr. McDonald this list?
No.
Why not?
We didn't get to it, frankly.
We said that we could show them.
They said, great, we've actually been doing the same thing.
We should send you the work that we've been doing as a team.
Okay.
So you never gave this to Mr. Wolfson or Mr. McDonald?
not that I remember.
Let's go to tab 13, Jacob.
This will be Exhibit 13, Bates, US-000063326.
So this is a recording of text messages and a Celebrite report.
It's just an image of texts on a phone.
This appears to be a conversation between.
Well, can we zoom in, Jacob, just so we could see?
Yeah, and yeah, there we go.
That's perfect.
So there are two phone numbers in the top left.
12024806696.
Was that a phone number, to your understanding, that was affiliated with Michael McDonald?
Yes.
Okay.
And then there's a number plus 17712109025.
Do you understand that to be your government phone number?
I think so.
Okay.
So in the first text on the right side, there's a bubble.
And if you could zoom in a bit more, Jacob, to that gray bubble, that's good.
X Doge Page Ownership Changes00:02:39
Thanks.
So it looks like the 9025 number sends a text to the 6696 number, Mike McDonald.
Does that seem to be what's going on?
Yes.
Okay, so this is a text from you to Mr. McDonald.
Is that fair?
I believe so.
Okay.
It says, quote, pardon me, this is sent on under delivered.
It says 520-2025.
Do you see that?
Yes.
Okay.
Were you still with the government at this point?
Yes.
Okay.
Was this after your work had been finished with the NEH, to your understanding?
Substantively, I think so.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
So you text Mr. McDonald and you say, quote, ringing to give you a heads up that the Doge team is planning to make an ex-post on NEH highlighting a few of the crazy DEI grants from Biden-era administration and reiterating that NEH grants going forward will be merit-based and awarded to non-DEI pro-America causes.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
Okay.
So it appears that you have a pretty specific reference point in what you call the Doge team.
Who's the Doge team that you're referring to there?
The leadership team.
Stephen Hikin, Josh Grunbaum, Anthony Armstrong, Anthony Armstrong, Josh Gernbaum.
And who else?
Stephen Hiken?
Stephen Aiken.
Okay.
And collectively, this leadership team was planning to make an ex-post?
Is that?
Yeah.
Okay.
Do you know who ran the X for Doge?
I know it moved around.
I don't know who was physically in charge while I was there.
Got it.
How did you become aware, before we strike that?
How do you know that, I guess I should say?
Nate.
Nate told you that the owner of the X Doge page moved around?
Leadership Team Planning Records00:03:50
Well, we just didn't know.
I didn't know who was running it.
But I know that Josh and Stephen had their own X accounts as well through GSA.
How did you find out that this was going to happen?
At the Expos was going to happen?
Yeah.
I think Nate told me.
Did you have an understanding of why the Doge account on X would post about NEH grants?
Just exemplatory work that's been done on aligning with the administration's priorities.
Did you often text Mr. McDonald's like this?
In the month prior to that, infrequently.
But while we were engaging, you know, can you get me from the lobby?
And no substantive work via text, but coordinating meeting times fairly common.
Via texts from your government on your government cell phone?
Yes.
Okay.
Did you search for those documents in the preparation or in the context of this litigation?
I didn't have my phone.
Got it.
But you were texting Mr. McDonald's on this phone number while you were working with NEH?
Yes.
Okay.
I'm just going to put it in the record that we request all of the text messages.
This is where that came from.
I know.
So it came from imaging his phone and producing it to you.
Right.
So we produce the ones that are responsive, so I don't know what you're requesting.
It's different from what we've already done.
Okay.
Just putting on the record that we make that request of the text messages that he's referring to that he shared with Mr. McDonald.
We produced the ones that we said we would produce pursuant to responsiveness criteria.
And so that is what we've done.
Okay.
Surely text messages about meetings that you were having with the head of NEH would be responsive to your communications with the head of NDH?
That's really not an issue for him to answer in his deposition, so I'm not sure what you're doing.
I'm putting it on the record for you.
Okay, we are not responding to whatever this new request is as phrased on the record.
I think we've been pretty clear about what we did.
Okay, great.
Thank you.
You know the Doge team is planning to post about, quote, crazy DEI grants.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
Okay.
Did you have an understanding of a crazy meant in this context?
Pro-America Causes Grant Review00:06:41
Grants that were most infringent on the EOs.
The EO is about DEI, gender ideology, and waste.
and waste.
It also says pro-America causes.
Do you see that?
Do you understand what that means?
America 250 grants, Garden for American Heroes, yeah.
Okay.
So is it your understanding that grants that involve DEI as they relate to the EOs are also not pro-America?
Sorry.
That depends on the grant.
Okay.
It says non-DEI, pro-America, though.
Right?
Yeah.
Okay.
So I guess my question is, could a grant be DEI and ProAmerica?
It depends on the grant.
How did you know that Anthony, Josh, and Stephen were involved with this ex-post?
They were the leaders that we were communicating with.
You also say that grants going forward will be merit-based.
Can you explain what you mean by that?
This is reiterating some of the verbiage that Mike felt the agency should be headed.
What Mike interprets as merit-based is entirely up to him, but this is just kind of the way that he wanted the agency to be heading towards.
Did he ever explain to you what he understood merit-based to mean?
We never got into definitionally what is merit-based in implied conversation.
It's just not discriminating based on cultural race, identity, gender.
Not discriminating based on purely based on merit.
Did you make an assessment of the scholarly quality of the grants that you were reviewing for potential termination?
We were only looking at it from the view of the EOs, whether it was related to DEI in any way or wasteful, non-critical, etc.
Okay.
So if you came across, strike that, did you ever come across a grant during your time at NEH that you flagged as DEI and then you did an additional assessment as to whether it was also pro-America?
Yes.
There were a few grants that, for example, may have been promoting a specific race within an American Veterans Initiative.
And while, yes, you are awarding a grant based on race, that is also a veterans benefit, which in our view and discussions is pro-America.
And so it would be adjusted from DEI related to aligned with Mike's view of NEH.
Okay.
In your view, were the grants that were eventually terminated on DEI grounds not merit-based?
It depends on which grant.
Do you have examples?
I guess just in general, I kind of want to understand how you were systematizing, let's say, merit, DEI.
It sounds like these are two concepts that are on your mind as you were looking at grants.
Is that fair to say?
Frankly, merit-based is how Mike was conceptualizing the go-forward review of applicants.
And as you know, I was looking on the historical view of grants that had gone out and whether or not they were related to DEI or wasteful spend.
And so my understanding is that Mike was going to implement new methods of just assessing purely on merit of an awardee.
Forward-looking.
Misaligned Administration Priorities00:15:14
Right.
Okay, so there's like a kind of a chronological element to this that I'm not sure I've fully appreciated before.
You were backwards looking at existing grants that had been awarded in your implementation of this DEI review.
Is that fair to say?
Some of them were going up for review with the board.
And part of the request from Mike and Adam was to assist in reviewing the 800 or I don't remember the exact number of awards that were up for review for approval or denial.
And so in that sense, they hadn't been awarded yet, but it was an ongoing active review.
Okay.
So let's scroll down a little bit, Jacob, and to the left so we can see that text.
I actually don't think this one has any text on it.
Does it?
Yes, let's scroll down to the next bubble below that.
There we go.
Mr. McDonald responds to you later on.
Does I look right?
A text from Mr. McDonald.
Yes.
Okay.
This is on, pardon me.
This is also on 520, 2025.
It appears that he responds to your last message that we looked at with, quote, just saw it, colon.
And then he drops an X link there.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
Okay.
And this looks like he's acknowledging that he thinks he's identified the X post that you were referring to in your text to him earlier.
Is that a fair reading of this?
Yes.
Okay.
Let's go to tab 14, Jacob.
This is Exhibit 14.
Alright, so this is an ex-post that is just the link that Mr. McDonald put in his last text message to you in Exhibit 13.
Does this look like what he was probably referring to?
Yes.
What he sent you?
Okay.
Have you seen this before?
Yes.
Okay.
And is this the ex post that you were actually referring to in your text message to him?
Yes.
Okay.
So let's look at some of these grants.
Let's look at the full text.
This is the Department of Government Efficiency X page.
Would you agree with that?
Yes.
And it says, during the previous administration, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the following grants to spend taxpayer dollars, all of which have been canceled.
Open parens, $163 million in overall savings, closed parens.
NEH grants will be merit-based and awarded to non-DEI pro-America causes.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
This language looks very similar to the text that you sent to Mr. McDonald's, doesn't it?
Yes.
Okay.
Had you seen this draft ex-post before you wrote to Mr. McDonald?
Yes.
Okay.
How did you see that?
draft form it was something that nate and i pulled together so So savings is something that Josh Kirnbaum has.
We had to report all of our grant and contract savings into him.
The verbiage NEH grants will be merit-based and awards non-DEI pro-America causes is from NEH's, I forget what it, like the publicity statement that Mike had launched, and so this was aligned with his thinking.
And then the Six grants were a consolidated version of some of the grants that were most infringent on DEI and wasteful spending EOs or targeting EEI and wasteful spending EOs.
So tell me if I'm misunderstanding this.
You actually helped to draft what eventually became this expost?
Yes.
Okay.
And what did you do with that draft?
I don't remember exactly, but we did make sure that it was accurate and that NEH, the direction of NEH, and the go-forward methodology for examining grants aligned with what Mike had issued in the press release.
Who did you collaborate with on this?
Nate.
Who else?
I don't remember who Nate sent it to, but this was a form of the draft that we put together, Nate and I.
Okay.
And let's look at the date.
It says May 20th, 2025.
Is that right?
Yes.
This was the same day, actually, that you texted McDonald in the last exhibit.
Does that sound right?
Yes.
Okay.
Let's look at some of these grants.
So the first line says $350K dollars, $350,000 for interactive gay travel guides to better understand historical LGBTQ spaces.
The second one says $350,000 to create a Spanish version of homosaurus.org.
The third one says $247,000 to digitize stories of transgender adults in the Pacific Northwest.
The fourth one says $75,000 to examine the relationship between the internet live streaming and LGBTQ communities.
Did I read those correctly?
Yes.
Do you remember seeing these grants earlier in this deposition?
Yes.
Where did you see those grants?
The preliminary list that we'd used to prep for the initial meeting with Mike and Adam.
The initial meeting, that was on March 12th, 2025.
Yes.
And this is a post highlighting those same grants in May 20, 2025.
Is that right?
Yes.
And you had identified these grants by running a list of terms that we saw through Chat GPT, is that right?
Objection?
No.
Okay.
You had identified these grants by screening grant descriptions for the list of terms that we discussed a little bit earlier, right?
Step one in a review is to hone in on where you may find grants that are not aligned with EOs.
And so step one was using that list, which was just a VLOOKUP on publicly available data.
Then you read the actual grant and determine what is this about, when does it reference the term that we matched it with, and then make the ultimate judgment call on, okay, from the lens of these EOs, is this TEI related or wasteful?
So you reviewed thousands of grants between your start at NEH and when you stopped working with NEH, right?
Yes.
Okay.
Is it a little odd that so many of, or at least five or six of the grants that you flagged for your initial meeting with Mr. McDonald and Mr. Wolfson ended up two months later on an X post on Doge's official account?
Objection.
Is it a little odd, meaning?
How do you explain that grants that were in your preliminary list, specifically these grants in your preliminary list, ended up being on the Doge official page, which ended up getting over half a million views?
Objection.
Because we reviewed each of the grants and these we believed were most infringent with the executive orders and to the point about what is the ex-post meant to do, it's just show some of the progress in aligning agencies like NEH with administration priorities.
And these grants were identified by you in the run-up to the meeting on March 12th with Mr. McDonald and Mr. Wolfsten by running terms through the grant description such as homosexual, gay, black, people of color, tribal, right?
Objection?
These along with 80 others.
80 other what?
Just hits on that term search.
So then you read the description and assess how misaligned is this with administration priorities.
Okay.
But again, these grants that we see here were on that preliminary list through which you ran a set of words to identify these grants that included words like black, homosexual, right?
To get to a big list of grants and all of their project descriptions, which we then had to read through each one and pull out shortened language of these grants.
You highlighted the four of the 80 or 100, I don't even remember how many hits it was, but we had to read the full description in order for us to make any assessment of how misaligned it was with the EOs.
Right, but these are grants that had words in the description that hit on the key terms from that list that we were discussing, right?
Yes, but they did not, that wasn't the sole reason that they would have ended up on this post.
You understand that?
Because I'm reading the full description to in the context of the EOs that had come out.
Is this wasteful?
Is this related to DEI?
Right.
Absolutely.
And I'm not implying that you did or didn't do that.
I was just asking the simple quote, the simple yes or no question.
Right, which I've answered.
Okay, sorry.
Sorry.
I don't.
Right.
Okay.
So you said you never showed that initial preliminary list to Mr. Wolfson and Mr. McDonald's, right?
That's right, but these do appear in the broader list of grants that we reviewed.
So it was your view going into your work with NEH, before you even stepped foot in there, that these specific grants probably violated or conflicted with the EO's DEI gender ideology.
and wasteful spending.
Is that right?
Maybe.
But we needed to confirm with Mike and Adam and read the full description, which again, publicly available information is different from what EGMS has.
So we use the source of truth in the final determination of whether this conflicted or not.
Right.
Well, why is $247,000 to digitize stories of transgender adults in the Pacific Northwest a crazy grant?
Objection.
In what way do you mean crazy?
In the way that you described it in your text to Mr. McDonald.
In the way that it is misaligned with administration priorities of focusing on non-DEI initiatives.
And who made that judgment?
When?
Who made the judgment that it was misaligned with the administration's priorities?
When?
Termination Mechanics and Judgments00:14:57
when you put it on your preliminary list for Mr. McDonald and Mr. Wolfson?
Prior to the meeting, you mean?
We just looked at what could be infringing on the EOs.
And Nate and I reviewed each of these to see which of these could conflict.
And all of these, if I remember correctly, ended up on the eventual termination list.
Right.
Several grants on that preliminary list ended up on the cancellation list.
Is that fair to say?
Separate and apart from the initial work?
Yes.
Okay.
And that was a list that you put together before you had a single meeting with Mr. McDonald.
Right?
Yes.
Mr. Who was there?
McDonald.
So in essence, just to recap, you put together a list of what you consider to be the craziest grants prior to meeting with Mr. McDonald and Mr. Wolfson, right?
In the context of is this aligned with administration priorities or not?
Yes.
And then fast forward two months, a lot of those grants at the top of that preliminary list end up on a post that Doge is putting into the Twitter X universe about grants that have actually been canceled.
Is that what's happening here?
Objection.
Could you repeat?
Two months later, a lot of those grants that were at the top of your preliminary list of crazy grants ends up in a doge post about cancelled grants.
Is that fair to say?
What do you mean by the top?
Like that it was within a list of the 180 that had tagged for these keywords?
Yes, if that's what you consider the top.
Okay.
Well, there's a portion of the spreadsheet that said craziest grants specifically, and I think it only has something like 25 grants.
Did you?
Can we pull it up?
Absolutely, yeah.
Jacob, can we go back to this will be tab 12,
Exhibit 12, so if we look at, again this is Tab 12, Exhibit 12.
If we look at row 3, it says craziest grants.
And then if you could scroll down very slowly, Jacob, you could stop there.
At row 25, another section starts that's called other bad grants.
Several of the grants that we looked at and that were on that X post are in the top 25 labeled under craziest grants.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, four of the 25.
Four.
Do you have an understanding for why out of the thousands and thousands of grants that were canceled, four from this top 25 that you had been compiling before ever, stepping foot into NEH, ended up on the cancellation list that was publicized on Doge?
Objection.
X. Because if you read the descriptions and confirm from the work with Adam and Mike, these are misaligned with the EOs For identifying wasteful spend and identifying programs that are related to DEI.
Can you scroll down to the bottom of this list, Jacob?
Just to the last entry.
Might be better to drag it.
So there are around 1,500 entries here.
Is that the bottom?
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, many of these may not be active.
Yeah, you can stop going down, Jacob.
You could just go back to the top.
Thank you.
Okay.
Did you run this list of words through every grant description that you could find on the I forget where you got this from.
Where did you get this from?
Grants.gov.
Grants.gov.
Did you run that detection list through every grant that was available on grants.gov?
From NEH?
From NEH, yes.
Yes.
So the 5 or 6 that ended up on the DOJX page would have been identified through the detection list, which is tab 3 of Exhibit 12.
No.
There was a review we did with Mike and Adam to read every grant.
And these were the most infringent on the four out of the six in the list were the most infringent of the EOs.
Okay.
So Mike and Adam agreed with you that the craziest grants that you identified before joining NEH were indeed the craziest grants that the NEH had, period.
I'll note that council is laughing, I guess.
I wasn't laughing.
I'm sorry.
Could you repeat the question?
I'm laughing.
I had a cough coming on right while I was sharing objection.
Okay.
I just want to keep this professional, counsel.
I literally cannot help it if I occasionally cough.
I am sorry about that.
Okay.
That was completely involuntary, and I am sorry.
I will try to keep coughing to a minimum, which I have been trying to do, but I am recovering from something, and I can't help it if it occasionally happens.
So I'm sorry to offend you by coughing.
Thanks, Council.
Let's go to.
Let's pull up tab 15, Jacob, but I'll ask a few questions before we get there.
Were you part of the process of actually sending out termination notices to grantees at NEH?
Yes.
Okay, describe what that process was.
And I mean the kind of logistical process in terms of how the grants actually left NEH and got to the grantees.
Sorry, the communication, the documents, preparation, where do you want to focus?
Sure.
I guess I'm just asking broadly, I guess before we start talking into like what communications were happening between you and Michael and Nate and Adam and the kind of hierarchy and who's deciding to do what, just the mechanics of sending out terminations.
Were you involved in that process?
Yes.
Okay.
What role did you play in that process?
Sending out the terminations.
Okay.
Can you describe what that entailed?
Yes.
For each grant, you need to have an official letter explaining why there was a termination.
That letter is bespoke to the grantee, the name of the organization, and an explanation for why Mike and team have elected to terminate.
And that goes out from an email, an NEH email, to the inbox of the grantees.
Okay.
And who is actually sending that email out?
Me.
Okay.
Through your GSA email account?
Through my NEH email.
Okay.
Was it the jfox at NEH.gov that we saw earlier?
No.
It was a notifications inbox that was set up so that not Brett, but the person that was in charge of grants at NEH so that he could have access to it and communicate directly with the grantees following their responses.
So this is a separate inbox, not from my JFox.
Okay. Let's go to top 15.
Jacob.
This is Exhibit 15. This is Bates US-000050461.
It's an email from Mr. Fox to Mr. McDonald and Mr. Wolfson, CCing Mr. Kavanaugh, sent on April 1st, 2025.
What document is this?
This is US-000050461.
Do you recognize this document?
Could I see the full context here?
Do you recognize this, Mr. Kavanaugh?
Perfect.
Mr. Fox.
I'm just refreshing a memory on this email.
Sure.
of kicks off an email chain.
Could you
scroll up, Jacob.
Okay, you can keep going up Let me know when you're ready to one more.
Drafting Notification Letters00:08:58
Yep.
Okay, I remember.
Great.
Is this a doctor?
Does this appear to be authentic to you?
Yes.
Upon review.
And is this an exchange you would have had in your ordinary course doing work with the NEH as a detailee from GSA?
Yes.
So in this email again from Mr. Fox or from you, Justin, to Mr. McDonald's, Mr. Wolfson, Cecing, Mr. Kavanaugh, the subject is re-NEH grants termination.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
And the body of this email from you to Mr. McDonald says, Mike, please see attached grant termination letter, which we have to use for organizations and state and jurisdictional humanities councils.
We will address these first and individuals/slash scholarship grants once the orgs are finished as those are more personalized.
Additionally, see below typical language sent to each of the grantees receiving notification.
If it's your preference, we can set up an email like grant underscore notification at NEH.gov and add language to the beginning of the email saying, quote, at the direction of the acting chairman for NEH, close quote, instead of sending from your email or signing off with your name and the signature.
Your details are already in the attachment.
Let us know on below and attached tomorrow.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
And below that, you're referencing, I think, the body of an email that would be sent to a grantee with the attached actual termination letter for that grant.
Is that right?
Yes.
So, do you have an understanding of why you were engaged in the actual process of sending out the grant terminations?
Because Mike did not feel confident in the timeline of getting notices out.
He said it was going to take hours of the team that they didn't have, and he wanted us to do it for him.
What's this proposition that you're making?
When you say, if it's your preference, we can set up an email like grant underscore notification at neh.gov.
What's my read of that sentence?
What are you...
Can you give me context as to what you're actually proposing here?
Yeah, ultimately, procedurally, it's going to be up to Mike how he'd like to send out some of these notifications.
He was NEH counsel.
He's going to have an opinion on how this is conducted, and this is just opening up optionality for him.
But what are you proposing?
To set up an email that's grant notifications at NEH or if he would like to send it from his email.
Right.
Did you end up setting up an email address like grant notification at NEH.gov?
If I remember correctly, I spoke with Mike on the phone following this email, unless there's an email that he responded to.
And his preference was to set up an email.
Okay.
So if I ask Mr. McDonald's at his deposition why you drafted this language, he's going to tell us it's because he told you to go draft that language.
Objection.
I don't know what he's going to say.
But I know that he wanted us to execute the terminations, and so we're doing anything we can to help him.
So he told you specifically to draft termination draft language for the terminations that you were going to be sending out?
Objection.
No.
But we were just helping him throughout this process.
So this is a courtesy, not a mandatory thing that we did.
Below that it says, dear, open parens, this is in the letter in the body of an email that would go out to the grantees in your draft.
You write, dear open parens, organization name, close parens.
We regret to inform you that your NEH grant has been terminated.
Please see the attached grant termination notice.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
And was the goal here to insert the organizations that had been subject to grant terminations?
The goal here is to get Mike's input on what would be sent alongside grant terminations.
Right.
But the organization name inside of the brackets there, that would be filled with organizations that were subject to grant terminations, right?
That is right.
Okay.
And you drafted this without Mr. McDonald directing you to draft this.
Is that right?
If I remember correctly, yes, I did this for his benefit.
Okay.
Did you also draft a letter that was attached to this, you know, alongside Mike?
Okay.
What do you mean alongside Mike?
In the standard normal course of draft that gets iterated, his input.
Ultimately, his sign-off.
When did you sit down with Mike and draft this language together?
Objection?
I don't know when precisely, but back and forth we had emails iterating on the language, redlining on the language.
Okay.
But you did the first draft of the letter.
Is that fair to say?
With input from Justin Eminetti, I drafted the first take.
And Mike, again, ultimately has sign-off.
With input from who?
Justin Eminetti.
Okay.
But you and Justin drafted the first draft of this letter.
Is that fair?
I drafted the first with Justin Eminetti's input.
So you're aware that the terminations here would be for active NEH, or grants that were active at the time of the sending of the terminations?
Is that fair to say?
Could you repeat that question?
This termination letter would have terminated active grants, correct?
I'm not sure I get what you mean.
I guess.
Remorse Over Terminated Grants00:04:58
Active grants.
Yeah.
I guess it's a little bit kind of circular.
We could actually just strike that question.
In the Doge X post that we reviewed earlier, the number that, there's a figure of $163 million that it references with respect to terminated grants at the NIH.
Do you remember that?
Yes.
Okay.
And having played a role in identifying grants that have to do with DEI, do you feel any remorse about the scale of the grants that were ultimately terminated on those grounds?
objection?
No.
In the context of the $2 trillion deficit, like we spoke about why I joined, it was to reduce wasteful spending and non-critical spend.
Sorry for those impacted, but there is a bigger problem, and that's ultimately the more important piece is reducing the government spend.
Did you ever find it problematic that you were alongside Nate shortlisting for termination projects that had hits on words like black, homosexual, LGBTQ plus objection?
What do you mean problematic?
What did you think about it?
Let me put it that way.
We were identifying wasteful spend in the government based on administration direction.
That was the whole reason we were there is to find savings.
But we saw in your list of terms you actually didn't use words like white, Caucasian, heterosexual.
Do you remember talking about that?
Yes.
And you didn't use those words to identify grants that would be conflicting with the EOs, right?
Very well could have.
Did you?
I didn't, but going back would have made sense because, as we've mentioned, there's DEI is a pretty encompassing bucket.
Okay.
What do you find wasteful about grants relating to black, homosexual, or LGBTQ subjects?
Objection.
It is non-critical spend, meaning nobody's life is at stake.
But you didn't screen for white, Caucasian, or heterosexual, right?
We could have.
But you didn't?
And that was based on your choice and Mr. Kavanaugh in selecting the words that you used to screen grants, right?
Objection.
The list itself was only a tool to find grants that we needed to read the full context for.
That was a judgment call based on your perception and Nate's perception on what would be DEI, right?
Objection.
Ultimately, what was canceled is at the discretion of the agency heads.
And those grants that we'd identified ultimately were canceled because of further depth review of the context and the descriptions.
Depth Review Cancellation Process00:02:59
Can we scroll down, Jacob, to the...
To the bottom, you know.
to go.
Well, we can go to tab 16, Jacob.
Okay, this is Exhibit 16, US-000050717.
This is another email thread.
The top email is from Justin Fox to Michael McDonald and Nate Kavanaugh, sent on March 31st, 2025.
Would you like to see the full email?
Yeah.
Yeah, if you wouldn't mind going to the beginning of this chain, you
can go up.
Really, before we oh, sorry, you're still reading.
I am, sorry.
You could probably zoom in a little bit to Jacob.
The text is kind of small.
Thank you so much.
I think I'm on this.
I might be on this email now.
Yeah, you can go up to the first page.
Discretionary Spending Decisions00:14:27
Okay.
I think I get the context.
Before we really analyze this email, sorry, I had a few follow-ups about our last conversation.
I think you said that you felt no remorse for the termination of these NEH grants.
Is that right?
I think if we're talking procedurally, I feel sorry for those impacted.
The bigger picture element is a necessary step in the right direction.
Not saving money because of the federal deficit.
Growth in government spending leads to a debt spiral, leads to hyperinflation, leads to every American feeling 10, 12 percent inflation.
It's knock-on effects of something that you can address today through non-critical spending cuts, or you can all feel tomorrow.
Did the federal deficit go down as a result of strike that did the federal spend, Did the federal deficit actually decrease from 2024 to 2025?
Discretionary spending was down $183 million in FY26 proposed budget from OMB.
Granted, there was a $600 or $400 or $600 million growth in Department of Defense budget, so it could have been more, but I think we were trending towards at least 183 of discretionary spending going down in FY26.
But did the deficit itself go down in its totality?
I'm not sure.
Would you be surprised to hear that it did not?
No.
Does that change how you assess whether there's any remorse about canceling hundreds of millions of dollars of grants for scholars in the humanities?
objection.
Again, I 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 individual, but this is an effort for the administration.
You said it went to non-wasteful spending, suggesting that the canceled grants were wasteful spending.
Is that fair to say?
Ultimately, it was the decision of Mike and Adam to address if it was wasteful or not wasteful.
In my opinion, what's certainly not wasteful is food stamps, health care, Medicare, Medicaid funding.
Right.
So, hundreds of millions of dollars of grants were terminated from the NEH.
The deficit didn't change much, and you were paid $150,000 to do that job of reducing the deficit.
Do you feel like the $150,000 paid to you was wasteful spending?
What are you definitionally saying wasteful spending is here?
Or however you defined wasteful spending when you said it?
The broad principle is to reduce the amount of dollars flowing out of the government into the market.
And so any chance you have to reduce dollars flowing out into non-critical life-supporting grants or programs, I would view as wasteful.
And so any software or even consultants that you pull in that assist you in redirecting funds to the most critical resources is not waste in the way that I would view wasteful spending.
So your job was not wasteful spending, but humanities projects that we've seen that were canceled as a result of your input were wasteful spending.
action?
Not necessarily.
What do you mean?
It just depends on how you're going to bucket or consider wasteful spending or not.
I'm asking you to apply your own definition of wasteful spending.
So, for instance, the net benefit of paying $150 in salary to redirect, for example, $163 million of humanities grants into something like food stamps for health care.
that means you've saved $183 million and you've lost $150,000, you know, 9 twelfths of that, $110,000 relative to $163 million that then was redirected into critical funding or saved.
So the net benefit would be not wasteful.
Right.
We saw a grant about women who had violence committed against them during the Holocaust.
Do you remember that grant?
Yes.
Okay.
You ended up determining that that grant had DEI elements to it.
Do you remember that?
Objection.
Yes.
Okay.
Would you say that that grant was wasteful spending?
Ultimately not my decision.
But do you think that that grant was wasteful spending?
Yes.
Okay.
But the $150,000 that Doge paid you to mark that grant as DEI was not wasteful spending.
Objection.
It's the net of the spend that you put in that determines if it's wasteful or not.
And so A grant that goes out to an individual that's creating a documentary on something related to DEI is not, those dollars could be getting put to something like food stamps or Medicaid for grandma in a rural county.
So that's not wasteful spend.
Right.
So because you were paid $150,000 to help to save hundreds of millions of dollars, that $150,000 was not wasteful.
Is that your position?
Jackson.
Yes.
Okay.
Thank you.
We can go to tab 16.
This is exhibit 16.
I'm almost wrapping up here, guys.
So we'll be out of here soon.
You've already reviewed this.
Do you recognize this document?
The email?
Yes.
Okay, yeah.
Okay, great.
If we scroll down to the first in time message, so the bottom of the document.
And again, this is US-000050717.
It says, Mike, excuse me, this is an email from Justin Fox to Michael McDonald and Adam Wolfson, CCNA Kavanaugh.
The subject is to review active grants.
Justin, here, you write, quote, Mike/slash/Adam, thanks for the productive time today.
See attached active grants for your review for DEI or wasteful spend.
Open parens, approximately 440 grants, close parens.
Flagging, these are ones, are the ones NEH staff marked NA for DEI.
It may be easier to review these in the Excel format so you can mark yes or no in the active Excel.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
What does NA for DEI mean, as you wrote it here?
The NEH staff had been reviewing grants for the last few months, and NA indicated a grant that they deemed to not have relation to DEI.
Not applicable for DEI.
Not applicable.
NA means not applicable for DEI.
They marked as NA in the comprehensive review they had of all the outstanding grants.
And NA, in their opinion, was not applicable for DEI.
Does that mean no DEI?
Attraction.
In their view, it does not apply to DEI in the construct of the EO.
Okay.
And then you did an additional review of the grants that they had marked that not apply or not applicable for DEI.
Is that fair to say?
According to Mike's and Adam's direction, yes.
Okay.
Do you have an understanding of why you would need to re-review grants that had already been marked not applicable for DEI?
Mike and Adam asked us to.
Okay.
Why couldn't Mike and Adam do this themselves?
They did.
They did.
And then they needed a third set of eyes after they did their review?
They did in tandem with our review.
Okay.
So there was already a review done by NEH employees and they marked not applicable for DEI, no DEI, right?
And then later on, you did a review of this already reviewed of these already reviewed grants to assess for DEI again.
Is that right?
Objection to form.
Yes.
Okay.
Was there any reason that you thought that NEH employees wouldn't be capable of making a sound call on whether a grant had DEI or not in their initial review?
Objection.
Well, Mike and Adam had asked us to, so they believed so.
Okay.
all right let's go up to the next email uh let's go up to the next one actually So later you email Mike McDonald on March 31st, 2025.
Mike, could you pass along your cell number?
Sorry, don't have it saved and need to catch up with you on something time-sensitive.
White House Pressure Dynamics00:12:34
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
Okay.
Do you know what you are referring to here?
What I was referring to in the email right above it.
Could you scroll up?
Okay.
And then, yeah.
So then a few minutes later, you write on the same day, Mike, please call me as soon as you can.
Did I read that correctly?
And then a few minutes later again, you write, Mike, call me when you get the chance.
We need a game plan for effectuating RIFs, final grant terminations, and contract cancellations by tomorrow a.m.
We will carry these plans out before the end of the week.
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.
Did I read that correctly?
Yes.
You keep referring to we.
Who's we?
Nate and me.
Anyone else?
Mike, we need a game plan for effectuating rifts, grand terminations, et cetera.
Anyone else besides you, Nate, and Mike?
In what context?
Well, you're saying we.
We will carry these plans out.
We need a game plan.
We're getting pressure.
Our side, who's we?
Our side is Nate and myself.
Okay.
So you're saying that you'd prefer that Mr. McDonald stay on the side of you and Nate here?
Objection.
Which inherently implies on the side of the White House.
Okay.
And when you say we're getting pressure from the top, what are you referring to there?
Broadly, this is pressure from OMB to free up money for spend on Garden for Heroes and America First initiatives.
This is also adherence to the EOs, which at this point will have been over 60 days outstanding, particularly as it relates to the DEI and wasteful spending and Doge lead EOs?
No.
Doge lead EO?
Doge lead EOs?
Yeah.
Right.
But let's get specific here because you ping him to have him call you three times in an hour, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
So then you say we're getting pressure from the top.
Is the top generally the amorphous OMB and other agencies that's causing you to call him and text him frantically within the span of an hour?
Objection.
We were in person here.
Every Doge member could come and go from GSA at any point.
Discussions are happening all the time between them and the White House and focusing on the priorities.
The pressure is a general pressure here.
And Mike was clearly in line or wanted to be in line with the administration.
And so that's what this is referring to: pressure to be in line with the administration given these EOs released so long ago.
Who determined that we need a game plan by tomorrow a.m.?
This is we referring to Nate and I. Who determined that tomorrow a.m. would be the appropriate day to have this game plan?
In our view.
You and Nate.
We will carry these plans out before the end of the week.
Again, we as you and Nate?
We in this context, given we cannot do things unilaterally, is the NEH team, Mike and Adam.
Okay.
So when you say pressure from the top, that's not referring to Gruenbaum?
The information was getting disseminated from, but like I said, we were always in person in GSA, and it was clear from conversations internally, no one person in particular.
but that the White House was focused on making sure that agencies were addressing the EOs that were getting dropped.
Right.
Agencies like the NEH and the Department of Labor, HHS.
Right.
So you said you don't know exactly where the information was coming from.
But there was some information disseminating about the urgency there?
I think so.
Okay.
And that's what you were channeling in this email to Mike McDonald?
Yes.
Okay.
Did anyone specifically tell you that NEH needed to have the cancellations, The cancellation game plan ready by tomorrow a.m. other than Mr. Kavanaugh?
Well, we were already late on adhering to the EOs on DEI initiatives and addressing wasteful spend.
So, Mr. Kavanaugh, I would agree with you that there was no specific person that was applying quote-unquote pressure from the top that I'm aware of.
Although this was nine months ago, ten months ago, so is there anyone that it could have been referencing?
I'm sorry, I'm not sure.
I don't remember.
It was 10 months ago.
Right.
For some people, 10 months isn't a very long time.
Abjection.
And for my 10 months, it feels like a lifetime.
How did you know that the White House was at play in this urgency that you're describing?
I knew that there were close relationships between White House and the liaisons that we were working with.
And we spoke on a daily basis with some of the leaders at GSA, Josh Grundbaum, Stephen Akian.
Steve Who?
Stephen Hickian.
Who were the close, who had these close relationships that you're referencing?
The leadership team.
So this is Grundbaum, Anakian, Armstrong.
Anyone else?
From what I remember, yeah.
Anyone else besides those three?
Well, there was probably 30 individuals that were older and in their late stage of their career.
Steve Davis is one that came up as someone that was involved, but not someone that we were looking to for specific game plans on agencies, although he was informed.
Who are you looking to for specific game plans on agencies?
Ourselves, Nate, and myself.
Nate, particularly, given he had been around longer, like I said, it was a working dynamic.
The EOs.
How did you know that Anakian, Grundbaum, Armstrong, Davis had relationships with the White House?
I just assumed as much, based on context they were sharing in our group meetings.
Were they making representations during the group meetings that made it seem like they were in communication with the White House?
I suppose.
Like what?
They were closer to Elon, and Elon was de facto over the relationship with Trump, and so priorities coming from whoever's closest with Elon.
I assumed, had the closest relationships in the White House.
Okay.
What did you understand the role of Gruenbaum, Armstrong, Anikian, and Davis to be, generally speaking?
senior guys with close relationships to Elon and deeply entrenched as leaders of the agencies that they're on board it to.
Senior guys within the Doge team.
And in their agency roles.
Anthony was deputy chair of OPM, and Stephen Akian was the head of GSA.
Gruenbaum was the head of Federal Acquisition Service, so titles.
Okay.
Let me pause there and go off the record, if that's okay with you.
Time 6.02 p.m.
Time now is 6.11 p.m.
This begins media 7 on the record.
Really quick before I wrap up, we were just talking about your colleagues, Armstrong, and Ikian, Davis, and Gruenbaum.
Remember that?
Yes.
Was it your understanding that they were taking direction from Elon and others affiliated with the White House?
My understanding is that they had the relationships and spoke very closely with constituents all involved in the administration.
So whether they were taking direction, I knew that they had close relationships.
Email Response Execution Plans00:05:51
I couldn't tell you specifically.
Okay.
Okay.
That's all I've got.
I'll pass the witness to my colleague Kyla, who's on Zoom, I believe.
Before we do that, I'm just going to put on the record that pursuant to the federal rules, in order to take a deposition remotely, you're supposed to get the agreement from the others involved, which does not happen here, but in the interest of efficiency, defendants are willing to move forward if the witness also is.
Yes.
Okay, thank you for that.
I'm going to ask a few questions.
I know we're getting towards the end of the day, and who's going to ask?
I'll keep this pretty short.
So I'm Kyla Snow from the ACLA places.
And I first just wanted to return to testimony your testimony earlier about the determination process.
And if I remember correctly, you said that I hope Donald told you on a phone call that he wanted you to execute determination notices.
Is that right?
But he wanted you to execute the determination notices.
Is that correct?
On a phone call or in person, I don't remember.
But he wanted us to execute after we solidified the list.
Procedurally, he wanted us to go and notify these grantees.
Okay, and when would he have to do that?
Do you remember, generally?
At some point before I queued up that email, sometime in mid-March, I would guess.
The email being the template for here's what we could say, give us your input.
So I assume that that email was sent before the terminations went out.
So at some point before then, either in person or over the phone, he wanted us to procedurally handle communications.
Okay.
I'm going to introduce just one exhibit.
This is, this looks like we're on exhibit 16.
This is in the record as AR13, and I just voted for that.
I think it could be exhibit 17 before we talked to exhibit 16.
I can put it.
I think the reporter noted that this would be exhibit 17.
Yes, sorry.
It is exhibit 17.
Sorry about that.
I'm sorry, AR what?
13. Can you keep that on your screen?
Yes.
Okay.
I will, I think this initial email before, so this is an email from you to Michael McDonald and after this send Ben Kavanaugh copy on March 28th at 11 to 7 a.m.
You saw this earlier.
Do you recall this email earlier?
I recall seeing what?
I missed that, sorry.
Do you recall seeing this initial email earlier?
Okay, you're talking a lot of fretsheets with DEI related grants.
I want to look at this email response from TAFCOM.
I'm sorry, you have to repeat that.
I want to look at this email response from Michael Kavanaugh.
It's dated March 13th at 4.28 p.m.
I'll zoom in a little bit more.
And I'll just give you the chance to read it.
Oh
To recap, you have the first subregion from Brett and he used up our spreadsheet that he and Michael McDonald and Adam Wolfet reviewed and sent to OMD listing all the applications implicated by the government.
Ready to Cancel Today Status00:06:56
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
You'll have to start your question over.
I cannot hear you.
Okay, I'm sorry.
I think it's a little ugly.
Hold on.
You need to speak closer to the microphone.
The AC is blasting in this room.
We can hardly hear you.
Okay.
I'll see what I can do.
Is this any better?
Yes.
Okay.
Thank you.
Okay.
So in this email, McDonald says, you have the first spreadsheet from Brett that Adam and I reviewed it as the OMD.
And he says, we were getting ready to cancel them today, but understand that you will do so.
He then says the second list of grants that NATU prepared that we reviewed today.
As you instructed, we have only included the ones seemed not to conflict the administration priorities such as what you heard George Washington.
And again, we understand that who will cancel this list of projects as well.
Why would he say we were getting ready to them today, but understand that you will do so.
This seems to contradict him asking you to permit to execute the terminations.
Objection.
When Mike says we were getting ready to cancel them today, as we discussed, Mike and I discussed this process would have taken weeks for the team to do.
So he wanted us to do it.
That's why he said, understand that you will do so.
Why would he say that he was getting ready to cancel them today then?
Objection.
What is your understanding of why he would say we were getting ready to cancel them today?
He was getting ready procedurally to begin the process of canceling.
But because of our conversation, he understands that we will do it.
It doesn't sound like he's getting ready procedurally to cancel them.
He says we were getting ready to cancel them today.
Objection.
Objection.
Is that a question?
I mean, is that what it says?
We were getting ready to cancel today.
That is what it says.
Okay.
So if Michael MacDonald were to justify that he was planning to cancel these grants on Monday, March 31st, would that be false?
Objection.
Could you clarify in this hypothetical when Michael was going to cancel them?
And would that be on the same day?
This email is dated Monday, March 51st.
And Michael MacDonald says, we were getting ready to cancel these grants, but today, well, understand that you do so.
So this thing to indicate he was getting ready to cancel them on Monday, March 31st, the same day that he sent the email to you.
Objection.
If he specified in his deposition that he was getting ready to cancel them on Monday, March 31st, would that objection?
I don't know.
I know that Mike and I have had discussions, and Nate and Adam, that the procedures for canceling these grants in their existing process was going to take hours and weeks of their time.
So when he says we are getting ready to cancel them today, there is a big procedural element for them.
And that was what we've talked about, that this is a multi-week process for them to cancel and terminate grants.
If I remember correctly, the 1st of April.
So that was the next day, right?
Yes.
I want to stop sharing this grant cycle.
Oh, there it is.
that down.
You set up the email account that was used to end the term in a few basis.
Who?
Was that the question?
I did.
Okay.
And who had access to that account when it was first set up?
Was it only you?
And the sysadmin administrator could have access to all the data associated.
Is the sysadmin administrator GSA at GSA?
I believe it was Brett Bobley, who is the CIO.
Go ahead.
And when the notices are sent on each book first from that account, did you send those notices?
Did I send the termination notices?
Award Description Context Dependence00:03:48
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
Where were you when you sent the nermination notices?
Do you at GSA?
In your office or at your own?
At GSA.
Okay.
Was anyone else discovered maybe Nate?
We sat next to each other at GSA, often late at night.
I don't know.
I don't remember if he was there or not.
Okay.
Then you hit send on the email notices that went out on April 1st?
After getting the full guarantee and approval from Mike, yes.
Okay.
Okay.
I just want to be clear on the understanding of DEI as it relates to the grants in your review of the grant.
Is it your position that if an award studied one particular race or gender, that that would be DEI?
I missed one word there.
Could you repeat?
Is it your position that if an award studied one particular race or gender, that would relate to DEI?
If you are one particular race or gender, would that relate to DEI?
That's the question.
If the award relates to one particular if the award relates to the study of one particular race or gender, could that be DEI?
Objection.
That depends on the grant, the full grant description and the context of what the award is delivering.
Okay, but if the award were the purpose of the award were to study the particular aspect of black creature, is that DEI?
Objection.
It depends on the full breadth of the award.
the full description that gives context to its relation to DEI or not.
Okay, if the full description of an award were to study first the black sorry.
If the full description of the award, your quote, UC 21st century flat culture, unquote, is that Again, there's a lot of context that comes with the full grant descriptions.
So if you have one particular grant in mind, we can review that and we can talk about whether we believe it relates or not.
Substantive NEH Termination Discussions00:06:54
But without that, you can't determine fully if it's fully related.
And I just have a few questions.
You were asked some questions by plaintiff's counsel earlier about communications via signal.
Do you remember that?
Yes.
Did you have any substantive discussions about grant terminations at NEH via signal?
No question to Slide.
Did you have any substantive discussions about grant terminations at NEH with Josh Bruenbaum?
No.
Did you have any substantive discussions about grant terminations at NEH with Anthony Armstrong?
No.
Did you have any substantive discussions about grant terminations at NEH with Mike Sullivan?
No.
Did you have any substantive discussions about grant terminations at NEH with Steve Davis?
No.
Did you have any substantive discussions about grant terminations at NEH with Steve Ahikian?
No.
Did you have any substantive discussions about grant terminations at NEH with Ryan Leopard?
No.
So you've testified today about various communications that you had involving Nate Kavanaugh, Michael McDonald, and folks at NEH about grants for potential termination.
Do you remember that?
Yes.
And did you also testified that you had some communications with the attorney, Justin Aminetti, relating to actions taken at NEH?
Do you remember that?
Yes.
Other than those individuals, did you have discussions with anyone else about which grants to terminate at NEH and for which reasons?
No.
No further questions.
How much time do we have?
I'll ask a few more follow-ups.
Do you remember the ex-post that you sent to Mr. McDonald's on May 20, 2025?
The ex-post.
There was an ex-post about the NEH that you tipped Mr. McDonald off to in a Celbright text report, and he responded saying, Yes, I saw it.
It's this one with the X link in the text.
Do you remember that conversation?
Yes.
Okay.
And you said that you played a role in drafting that X post.
Is that right?
Yes.
What was that ex-post about again?
Grants.
NEH grants, right?
Yes.
That had been canceled?
Is that right?
Yes.
Did you post that on X yourself?
No.
Did Nate Kavanaugh post that on X?
No.
Who posted that on X?
I don't know.
Okay.
But it wasn't you and it wasn't Nate, right?
No.
Okay.
Who did you submit the draft to for that X post?
I don't remember.
You don't remember who Nate and I worked on it, and I don't know when it left from draft form on with Nate.
But that being said, we were all in person at GSA.
It's your understanding that some of the higher-ups within the Doge team were controlling the X, the DogeX account.
Is that right?
Objection.
You testified to this earlier.
Objection, and I'm also going to note that thus far this redirect doesn't appear to have anything to do with the questions that I asked, which it would have to in order to be an appropriate redirect.
It does.
Go ahead.
Could you just go back on the question?
I can strike my question.
Is it your understanding that Doge team members like Armstrong, Gruenbaum, Davis would have been Doge members with access to key decision-making, like what gets posted on the Doge X account?
Objection.
I don't know for certain.
Do you have a hunch?
Objection.
My best guess would be those guys know who has control or who posts.
But I don't know anything for certain.
And that post was exclusively about any age, right?
The post that we walked through?
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
So is it fair to say that someone higher up on the Doge team with access to the X account for Doge had been part of a draft or received a draft explicitly and exclusively about NEH grant terminations?
Jackson.
Well, all of my terminations and reporting contracts and grants were going through Josh Gruenbaum, who was head of Federal Acquisition Services.
That's how they understand where the flow of money is flowing from.
So the ex-post was about historical terminations.
Same information that I would have shared with, or that I did share with Josh as part of the normal course of collecting contracts and grant termination information.
And that's including NEH grants, right?
Yes.
Okay.
That's all I've got.
Time is significant, but we have we need seven to seven today's deposition