A federal judge in Manhattan ruled Thursday that the Trump administration's cancellation of more than $100 million in National Endowment for the Humanities grants was unconstitutional — permanently barring the administration from terminating the funding, per NBC News.
Said Judge Colleen McMahon: "The public has a strong interest in ensuring that federal officials act within the bounds set by Congress and the Constitution."
The ruling lands on a question older than DOGE and older than Trump: whether a president can simply stop spending money Congress has already appropriated. The answer, across two and a half centuries of American constitutional practice, has always been no.
The constitutional argument at stake here is not novel. It was fought and settled once before — and the current administration is testing whether a compliant political environment can reopen it.
When Richard Nixon impounded billions in congressionally appropriated funds in the early 1970s — refusing to spend money on housing, water treatment, and other programs he opposed — Congress responded with the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which made clear that the executive cannot unilaterally cancel spending that Congress has directed. Nixon’s impoundments were eventually struck down in court; the 1974 law codified the principle. The Trump administration’s grant cancellations walk directly into that same constitutional wall.
What is new here is the instrument: the Department of Government Efficiency, an entity with no statutory existence, deploying ChatGPT to flag grants for elimination based on perceived ideological content.
U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon did not write a narrow procedural opinion. She identified two distinct constitutional violations.
First, viewpoint discrimination under the First Amendment. The administration canceled more than 1,400 grants — the overwhelming majority of those awarded during the Biden administration, with only roughly 40 spared — based on their association with diversity, equity, and inclusion. McMahon called this “a textbook example of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.” The government’s defense was remarkable: officials argued that because ChatGPT did the classifying, the government bore no constitutional responsibility. McMahon rejected that directly: “ChatGPT was the Government’s chosen instrument for purposes of this project, and DOGE’s use of AI to identify DEI-related material neither excuses presumptively unconstitutional conduct nor gives the Government carte blanche to engage in it.”
Second, a violation of equal protection under the Fifth Amendment. Grants were targeted not for programmatic failure but for the perceived viewpoint of their recipients.
The ChatGPT episode is worth dwelling on. Among the grants flagged as DEI by the AI tool was an anthology titled In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union. That an algorithm trained on patterns labeled Holocaust memory as a DEI threat is not a minor technical error. It is an illustration of what happens when enforcement of ideological conformity is delegated to a machine calibrated to find ideology everywhere.
The NEH was established in 1965. Its authorizing statute charges it — in language McMahon quoted — with helping to create and sustain “a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry.” That is not rhetorical ornamentation. It is the statutory purpose against which the grant cancellations were measured and found wanting.
Said Sarah Weicksel of the American Historical Association, one of the plaintiff organizations: “This ruling is an important achievement in our effort to restore the NEH’s ability to fulfill the vital mission with which Congress charged it.”
The administration’s position — that executive orders titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs” supersede congressional appropriations and statutory mandates — would, if accepted, effectively transfer the power of the purse from the legislative branch to the White House. That transfer is precisely what Article I of the Constitution was designed to prevent. The branch that controls spending controls policy. The framers knew this.
The administration has not announced whether it will appeal, and McMahon’s permanent injunction will face pressure in the circuit courts. But the ruling joins a growing body of lower-court decisions finding that DOGE’s operational footprint — an entity with no statutory authority directing the cancellation of lawfully appropriated funds — has no legal foundation. The courts are doing what Congress has so far declined to do: hold the line on Article I.