Nate Cavanaugh is proud about wiping out “useless agencies” and eliminating thousands of public servants. Any regrets about people losing their livelihood? “No,” replied the baby-faced DOGE slasher, because it was “more important to reduce the federal deficit.”
Got it. So, Nate, did you reduce the deficit? “No, we didn’t.”
Still, Nate made his mark, bouncing from agency to agency.
When the US African Development Foundation wouldn’t let DOGE in the door, Nate and his crew enlisted US Marshals, who had the locks changed. As acting director of the Interagency Council on Homelessness, he benched the entire staff. Ditto at the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Then there was the US Institute of Peace (USIP), the think tank Congress created to help prevent wars. Installed as acting president, Cavanaugh fired nearly all 300 employees in alphabetical order. Very orderly. He then tried to hand USIP’s $500 million headquarters to GSA free of charge. But he was foiled by the woke judiciary: A Reagan-anointed judge declared Nate’s appointment invalid and his actions “null, void.”
No question, Nate has cojones: He even tried to embed DOGE at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which by law isn’t a government agency.
But his masterpiece was the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Nate and fellow DOGE operative Justin Fox fed grant summaries into ChatGPT, asking if each one related “at all” to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and telling the chatbot to reply in under 120 characters. Within weeks, more than 1,400 grants worth over $100 million were stricken. According to a lawsuit, a judge called the cuts “a textbook example of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.”
Now Nate and Justin have launched Special, bringing their special talents to the private sector.
