Nate Cavanaugh

Cavanaugh was a 19-year-old student at Indiana University when he co-founded Brainbase, an intellectual property management platform. He then dropped out of college. In 2021, Cavanaugh was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Enterprise Technology list for his role as Brainbase co-founder.^{[10][1][11][12]} Cavanaugh is the son of Pat Cavanaugh, founder of Ready Nutrition.^[11]

On March 12, 2025, Cavanaugh and fellow DOGE employee Justin Fox began overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency’s work with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) after its chair, Shelly C. Lowe, left at President Donald Trump's direction and NEH general counsel Michael McDonald became acting chair.^[13][14][15]

Under Cavanaugh and Fox's leadership of the NEH, DOGE used ChatGPT to identify grants that were in violation of Trump's executive orders related to DEI, ultimately terminating 97% of the agency's grants within 22 days.^[16][17] Fox and Cavanaugh prompted the chat bot to answer in less than 120 characters.^[18]

In March 2025, after Cavanaugh was appointed president of the US Institute for Peace, he transferred ownership of the headquarters building to the General Services Administration.^[6][19][20] On May 18, Cavanaugh's appointment was ruled unlawful by Judge Beryl Howell.^[21][22][23]

Cavanaugh was deposed on January 23, 2026, as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Modern Language Association against the Trump administration in connection with his role in the termination of NEH grants.^[7][8][24] Videos of Cavanaugh and Fox's depositions went viral.^[18]

In subsequent court filings, the plaintiffs and NEH produced additional materials describing DOGE's involvement in grant terminations.^[25][26][16]

Discovery materials in the lawsuit state that Cavanaugh, as part of a small DOGE team including Fox, advised NEH leadership on identifying previously awarded grants for possible termination under Trump administration executive orders and that DOGE staff used spreadsheet keyword searches and the ChatGPT language model to help flag projects for review.^[9] Cavanaugh admitted that the DOGE team was not successful in reducing the deficit, but that he did not regret harming the livelihood of those whose grants he was involved in terminating. ^[27]

On March 13, 2026, judge Colleen McMahon of the Federal District Court in Manhattan ordered the viral videos of Fox and Cavanaugh's depositions to be taken down, ordering the scholarly groups "take any and all possible steps to claw back” the videos.^[28] Ten days later, Judge McMahon lifted her order, ruling that the risk of "embarrassment and reputational harm" was not enough to overcome the public interest in Cavanaugh's and Fox's descriptions of their official conduct.^[29]