In a major announcement, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) revealed the cancellation of $163 million in woke National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants. The abusrd grants,which included funding for LGBTQ+ cartoonists and a “vocabulary of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) terms,” show why DOGE is essential to Donald Trump’s agenda.
For context, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was introduced by President Trump in 2024 and charged with reducing bureaucratic inefficiencies, cutting redundant programs, and fighting fraud. Led by Elon Musk, DOGE has made several high-profile busts, which exposed the ridiculous waste of money in ordinary federal programs.
Taking to X on May 20, 2025, DOGE announced the massive cuts. Its post read, “During the previous administration, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded the following grants to spend taxpayer dollars, all of which have been cancelled ($163M in overall savings). NEH grants will be merit-based and awarded to non-DEI, pro-America causes:”
Listing the most egregious examples, DOGE wrote, “- $350k for interactive gay travel guides to better understand historical LGBTQ+ spaces – $350k to create a Spanish version of http://Homosauras.org (https://en.homosaurus.org) – $247k to digitize stories of transgender adults in the Pacific Northwest.”
Listing more absurd wastes of money, the department continued, ” – $75k to examine the relationship between internet live streaming and LGBTQ+ communities – $60k to research how LGBTQ+ cartoonists innovated comics in the 1980s & 1990s – $150k for excavation of Egypt’s first industrial-scale brewery.”
In the comments under the post, users were enraged by these flagrant examples of waste. One such comment read, “Every car payment you struggle to make. Every rent payment you’re scraping the barrel to pay every month and every food item that you had to put back on the shelf because you couldn’t afford to buy it remember that they spent hundreds of billions of our tax dollars on everyone who didn’t earn it to foreign countries who don’t deserve it, while you’re paying for it.”
Justifiably annoyed, one comment read, “So we were shelling out tax dollars for woke travel guides and cartoon studies while the country was drowning in debt? No wonder the NEH stood for “Not Even Helpful.” Glad that faucet finally got shut off.”
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Speculating on better uses of $163 million, one woman wrote, “It would be lovely if arts funding could teach children interactive play, musical performance, writing and art and promote imagination and creativity from k-12…..without a rainbow requirement. We need imagination, we need creativity, we need to support real artists of all kinds who have hopeful and helpful visions about life’s potential and who commit bold renderings of breathtaking beauty.”
Rounding out the comments, one user tied these cuts to Trumps Agenda, saying, “Cutting grants tied to LGBTQ+ initiatives and humanities research is being framed as “$163M in savings,” but those funds were spread across multi-year projects in education, archival work, and cultural history. Shifting toward “pro-America, non-DEI” criteria isn’t just about phrasing — it’s a sharp turn in value alignment.”
One of the wasteful projects that was slashed by DOGE, was Homosaurus, which describes itself as “An international linked data vocabulary of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) terms. This vocabulary is intended to function as a companion to broad subject term vocabularies, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings.”