1. United States
2. Pa.
3. Letter

You need to investigate the Department of Government Efficiency's destruction of the National Endowment for the Humanities grant program. DOGE staffers with zero peer review or government experience cancelled 97% of grant applications, and they don't even think that's a problem. Nathan Cavanaugh, one of the DOGE staffers reviewing NEH requests, admitted in a deposition that he saw nothing inappropriate about unqualified people making these decisions. These weren't minor grants. They were research projects vetted through rigorous academic peer review processes that DOGE staffers were completely unequipped to evaluate. Cavanaugh and his team used President Trump's 2025 executive order banning DEI as justification to gut nearly every application. This isn't efficiency. It's incompetence masquerading as reform. Researchers who spent months preparing applications had their work dismissed by people who lack the expertise to understand it. The damage to American scholarship and our competitive edge in research will take years to repair. Congress has oversight authority here. Launch an investigation into DOGE's grant review process, demand accountability for these decisions, and establish guardrails requiring actual subject matter expertise for future reviews. Amateurs shouldn't be cancelling the work of experts.