The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has much work underway, announcing the cancellation of several Biden-era grants that were going toward bizarre and wasteful causes, such as research on LGBTQ+ cartoonists and gay travel guides.
“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,” DOGE wrote on social media, noting that these cancellations have resulted in an overall savings of $163 million.
A $350,000 NEH grant, for instance, was for “interactive gay travel guides to better understand historical LGBTQ+ spaces.” Another grant to the tune of $247,000 was set to “digitize stories of transgender adults in the Pacific Northwest.”
A $60,000 grant was allotted to “research how LGBTQ+ cartoonists innovated comics in the 1980s & 1990s,” and $75,000 was to “examine the relationship between internet live streaming and LGBTQ+ communities.”
Not all grants were LGBTQ centered, however. One grant, coming in at $150,000, was for “excavation of Egypt’s first industrial-scale brewery.” And another $350,000 grant was for creating “a Spanish version of http://Homosauras.org (https://en.homosaurus.org).”
“NEH grants will be merit-based and awarded to non-DEI, pro-America causes,” DOGE affirmed.
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:
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) May 20, 2025
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The update comes as total DOGE savings clocks in around $170 billion, or $1,055.90 of savings per U.S. taxpayer. The savings is a combination of contract and lease cancellations and renegotiations, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, fraud detection, and more.
According to the DOGE leaderboard, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) stands as the department generating the most savings thus far, followed by the General Services Administration (GSA) and Department of Education. Those generating the least savings include the Department of Veteran Affairs, NASA, and the Department of Transportation.
