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April 14, 2026
Last spring, when employees from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency arrived at the National Endowment for the Humanities, they used ChatGPT to decide which federally funded grants to eliminate.
They typed one, simplistic prompt: “Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’”
A documentary about Jewish women forced into slave labor during the Holocaust? DEI. A 40-volume scholarly series on the history of American music? DEI.
Within two weeks, DOGE staff had flagged nearly every active award from the Biden administration and cut the National Endowment for the Humanities budget by half.
This search-and-destroy approach uses artificial intelligence as an ideological wrecking ball.
But we can use artificial intelligence differently. Instead of stripping communities of federal funding, we can use AI to help them access the money Congress appropriated, fulfilling congressional intent and strengthening our democratic institutions.
A free platform called GrantWell does exactly that, and shows the way we should be building AI with communities in the public interest.
What are federal grants?
To understand what’s at stake, it helps to understand what federal grants actually include. Every year, Congress appropriates more than $1 trillion in tax dollars in the form of grants and directs them back to states, cities, towns, and communities across the country to invest in replacing lead pipes before more children are poisoned, repairing bridges before they fail, expanding broadband to rural areas the market has never reached, putting clean school buses on the road, and modernizing an electrical grid that is decades behind.
The challenge of obtaining those grants often results from a lack of staff knowledgeable about how to apply. Massachusetts alone estimates that their communities are eligible for approximately $17.5 billion in federal grants, yet less than 30% of that money is successfully accessed by local governments, according to a state study. The money is technically available. Congress specifically reserved it for this exact purpose of ensuring that local governments can improve services for its constituents. But finding it, understanding it, and applying for it has become so complex that smaller communities are effectively locked out.
AI for Impact: Community-centered AI in action
I run a program called AI for Impact, where graduate, undergrad, and community college students are paid to take time off—think of it like a semester abroad, only in Boston and in New Jersey—to build AI-enabled products for and with government partners.
Anjith Prakash and Jai Surya Kode took time out of their graduate studies in AI at Northeastern University to create the first version of GrantWell, working in partnership with Massachusetts’ Federal Funds and Infrastructure Office.
We built GrantWell by listening to the communities most in need of these grants. Anjith and Jai joined the team from the Massachusetts Federal Funds and Infrastructure Office and traveled across the state, meeting with local officials, tribal representatives, and community organizations.