DOGE Finds Fraud in Humanities Budget Using Only a Flashlight, a Ferret, and Common Sense

WASHINGTON, DC — In a stunning 3 a.m. raid conducted from a La-Z-Boy recliner in the Pentagon’s forgotten budget office, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uncovered 10 humanities programs so ridiculous, so dripping in pretension and incense smoke, that even performance artists have demanded a refund.

Here’s what they found, complete with funny evidence that proves—without a shadow of a government-funded shadow puppet—that this was waste, fraud, and abuse.

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DOGE Uncovers a Decade of Humanities Grift: Mime Majors, Sasquatch Professors, and the Museum of Nothing

In a newly released audit labeled “Operation Highbrow Heist,” the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) revealed that over $45 million in federal humanities grants were funneled into programs that, according to investigators, “may have been conceptual art pieces in and of themselves.”

DOGE’s findings suggest that many of these programs operated under the assumption that if you can’t measure results, you also can’t be held accountable for them.

The Institute for the Preservation of Invisible Artifacts

Operating out of a windowless loft in Brooklyn (and partially in “metaphysical space”), this institute received $2.1 million to catalog “cultural objects that cannot be seen, touched, heard, or verified.” Its director, a man who identifies only as “Glyph,” claimed the institute housed over 3,000 “meta-antiquities,” including The Wind of Plato’s Beard and Socrates’ Last Shrug.

A field inspection by DOGE revealed an empty room with a velvet rope and a sign reading, “Please don’t breathe on the artifacts.” A security guard confirmed, “There used to be an invisible sword here, but someone stole it.”

The Center for Advanced Mime Studies

Based at a liberal arts college in Vermont, the center offered terminal degrees in “Applied Stillness.” Students were graded on their ability to emote climate change through facial twitching and box-walking.

The capstone project for the most recent graduating class involved reenacting the Treaty of Versailles entirely through eyebrow choreography. The project was canceled mid-performance due to a spontaneous interpretive walkout that nobody noticed for six hours.

One former student, now a barista, described the experience as “life-changing, though I can’t explain why because that would betray the medium.”

Society for the Appreciation of Obsolete Technologies

This group received $1.6 million to host an annual conference where attendees communicated exclusively via fax machine and morse code. Presenters were required to use overhead projectors powered by hand cranks. At one event, a panelist suffered a wrist injury attempting to rewind a VHS tape for a live reenactment of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The keynote speaker in 2023 accidentally started a small fire while trying to “warm up the floppy drive.”

Bureau of Unnecessary Translations

Originally intended to preserve endangered languages, the Bureau eventually funded a multi-year effort to translate The Cat in the Hat into Proto-Hittite, a language nobody currently speaks, including the translators themselves. Each translation took 14 months and a team of six scholars with ceremonial hats and no actual field experience.

One internal memo proudly noted, “We have rendered ‘Thing One and Thing Two’ into a sequence of sacred syllables once used in goat burial chants.”

National Institute for Procrastination Research

The institute, headquartered in a hammock factory, received rolling grants since 2008. Its official logo was a snail asleep under a to-do list. Although the mission was to research time management and motivational psychology, the team missed 42 deadlines and submitted its first report 11 years late. The report was one sentence long: “We’ll get to it.”

The office voicemail simply stated, “Your call is important to us. Please hold. Forever.”

Academy of Cryptozoological Studies

DOGE uncovered nearly $4 million in grants to this Appalachian academy for “field research” into mythical animals. The budget included custom ghillie suits, a drone shaped like a yeti, and weekly “telepathic outreach sessions” held in a sauna.

The academy’s leading professor, Dr. Hank “Possum” LaGrange, claimed to have “made eye contact with a Chupacabra through astral projection.” His student thesis, Werewolves: America’s Forgotten Regulators, received a MacArthur “Genius” nomination from an anonymous source later revealed to be his cousin.

Department of Redundancy Department

This bureaucratic ouroboros was created to audit audits, evaluate evaluations, and fact-check fact-checkers. It once spent $320,000 re-translating government memos into English… from English.

The department was housed inside another department, which it was also tasked with overseeing. At one point, it spent six months writing a report on its own productivity, which concluded that “further analysis is required.”

Center for the Study of Studies

By far the most introspective of the group, this center existed solely to evaluate the usefulness of other studies. Its final publication—entitled A Meta-Evaluation of the Methodologies in Meta-Methodological Reviews—was 947 pages of footnotes, all citing each other.

DOGE staffer Riley Munch described reading it as “like being trapped in a Wikipedia loop while slowly drowning in grant money.”

Institute of Perpetual Motion Dance

This Santa Cruz-based institute claimed to merge kinetic energy theory with interpretive dance. Their most infamous performance, Entropy: The Sequel, involved dancers attempting to move forever using only kale smoothies and sheer willpower. Two sprained ankles and one philosophical breakdown later, the grant was quietly revoked.

One donor expressed disappointment: “I expected to see time itself collapse. All I got was a sweaty man yelling ‘I am the gear!’ while spinning in place.”

Museum of Future Artifacts

Located in an undisclosed shipping container behind a Denny’s in Oregon, the museum showcased inventions that don’t exist yet. Exhibits included iPhone 52 with Mind Control Mode, Elon Musk’s Soul, and the last physical dollar.

Visitors were charged $45 to walk through a blank hallway lit with blue LEDs. A curator described the exhibit as “a confrontation with the tyranny of temporality.” Exit surveys revealed 92% of patrons thought it was a haunted escape room.

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DOGE’s Conclusion

In its final report, DOGE summarized the programs with ruthless efficiency: “We found fraud, waste, and existential dread. Mostly the last one.”

Congressional Response: A bipartisan coalition has vowed to repurpose the funds for practical research, such as teaching toddlers how to code and giving small towns their first working stoplights since 1967.

White House Statement: “The arts remain a vital part of our democracy. But some of these arts were more vital to hallucination than education.”

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Disclaimer:
This article was produced in total collaboration between two sentient humans: a cowboy who once danced in a mime circle for anthropology credit, and a dairy farmer who taught Sasquatch how to read Beowulf. No AI or government mime was harmed in the making of this report.