Winning a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities can take months of preparation and can require multiple attempts. So last year, when DOGE officials with no humanities experience yanked the funds of hundreds of grantees using little more than a chatbot and a haphazard search for terms such as BIPOC and gay , it stung. “The NEH, NEA, Guggenheim, and maybe one or two other grants are considered just the gold standard for your prestige in the academy,” Elizabeth Kadetsky, an English