DOGE’s AI Grant Cuts Just Hit the Wall of Due Process
# DOGE’s AI Grant Cuts Just Hit the Wall of Due Process
AP reports that U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in Manhattan ruled the Trump administration’s cancellation of more than $100 million in humanities grants unconstitutional and said the Department of Government Efficiency had no authority to end the funding. The case was brought by The Authors Guild, other groups, and individuals whose grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities were canceled. McMahon permanently barred the administration from terminating the grants and criticized DOGE’s use of artificial intelligence in cutting the funding. Government lawyers had argued that more than 1,400 congressionally approved grants were legally canceled to implement President Trump’s directives, reduce discretionary spending, and eliminate grants associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion. The White House and Justice Department did not immediately comment, and an appeal was not immediately clear.
There is a right way to shrink government and a wrong way. The right way is to go through the law, make Congress own the spending, expose the waste, and force the bureaucracy to defend itself in public. The wrong way is to pretend that executive power plus an algorithm can erase obligations Congress already approved. That is not reform. That is the administrative state wearing a different jersey.
The humanities-grant fight is easy for many readers to dismiss. They hear “grants,” “writers,” “DEI,” or “humanities,” and assume the money must be expendable. Some of it may be. A serious audit of federal cultural funding would probably find plenty that deserves scrutiny. But the constitutional question is not whether every grant is wise. The question is whether an administration can cancel congressionally approved funding through a mechanism the court says had no authority to do it.
That is where the story matters. If DOGE can use artificial intelligence and internal directives to wipe out grants today, some future administration can use the same machinery to wipe out different grants tomorrow. The target changes. The precedent remains. Conservatives should understand this better than anyone. Power built to punish your enemies does not retire when your enemies lose office. It waits for the next operator.
This is the trap of government-by-vibe. The public is rightly angry about waste, ideological capture, bureaucratic arrogance, and institutions that spend taxpayer money without accountability. But anger is not a replacement for lawful process. If the executive branch wants to cancel spending, it has tools: propose rescissions, litigate authority openly, push Congress to rewrite programs, publish audits, and name the waste. That is slower than an algorithmic purge. It is also the difference between constitutional government and managerial improvisation.
The AI angle makes this sharper. Artificial intelligence can help find duplication, flag suspicious spending patterns, and surface grants that deserve human review. Used that way, it is a flashlight. But when AI becomes a shortcut around statutory authority, it becomes a weaponized bureaucracy. The problem is not that software was involved. The problem is that software can make unlawful action look clean, neutral, and efficient.
This is how institutional legitimacy gets destroyed from both directions. The old bureaucracy says: trust us, process is too complicated for citizens to understand. The new disruption class says: trust us, speed matters more than process. Both positions ask the citizen to surrender oversight. Both should be rejected.
A real anti-corruption movement should welcome the discipline of law. If a grant is indefensible, prove it. If a program is captured, expose it. If Congress funded nonsense, make Congress vote on the record. Do not hide behind opaque AI screening and executive slogans. The citizen’s money deserves scrutiny, but the citizen’s constitutional protections deserve scrutiny too.
The judge’s ruling is not a defense of every humanities grant. It is a warning that reform cannot become a mirror image of the abuse it claims to fight. The administrative state is not defeated when a different faction grabs the controls. It is defeated when power is forced back into accountable channels.