DOGE asks U.S. Supreme Court to block access to its records
The Trump administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt a judge’s order that would force it to answer questions from a watchdog group and turn over documents about Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in a fight over public access to the office’s records.
The Justice Department is challenging a ruling that requires the U.S. DOGE Service to comply with demands by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, for information about its structure and operations. That includes making DOGE administrator Amy Gleason available to testify under oath at a deposition. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit on May 14 denied the government’s request to intervene.
The underlying legal fight turns on whether the DOGE office is an agency covered by the Freedom of Information Act, a law that empowers the public to get government records and other information. The administration contends that the U.S. DOGE Service — the entity created by President Donald Trump to carry out Musk’s project — is an office within the White House that is exempt from the public records law.
A spokesperson for CREW did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The emergency request to the justices on Wednesday came shortly after the lower court judge in Washington set a schedule that would require the administration to begin answering questions about DOGE within a week. Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote that the order at issue “clearly violates the separation of powers, subjecting a presidential advisory body to intrusive discovery and threatening the confidentiality and candor of its advice.”
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper previously found that CREW, which filed the lawsuit, was likely to succeed in showing that the U.S. DOGE Service “wields the requisite substantial independent authority” to fall under the Freedom of Information Act. But the judge hasn’t made a final ruling on the issue.
On April 16, Cooper largely granted CREW’s request to gather evidence about DOGE to respond to the government’s effort to have the case tossed out.
Cooper said that because the government submitted multiple declarations from Gleason about DOGE in the case, that made her fair game for questioning by CREW’s lawyers. However, Cooper denied CREW’s request to force Steve Davis, a longtime Musk associate and top DOGE official, to testify. The judge said CREW hadn’t shown that Davis was “uniquely positioned” to provide information that the watchdog group couldn’t get from Gleason or another DOGE representative.
The judge approved CREW’s requests for information about the DOGE teams within other U.S. agencies and the systems they’ve had access to, as well as the role of DOGE-affiliated staff in recommending federal spending cuts and personnel decisions. He narrowed CREW’s request for information about DOGE’s record-keeping practices, including whether staff are using encrypted messaging applications with an auto-delete function such as Signal, saying that they weren’t relevant to the question of whether DOGE was exercising the type of authority that would subject it to the federal records access law.
Last week, the three-judge DC Circuit panel found that the administration forfeited raising a separation-of-powers objection to Cooper’s order because it hadn’t argued that issue before. Even if it could press that claim, however, the appellate judges said that what the Washington judge had required the administration to do was “modest” and that officials could raise executive privilege challenges as needed.
The DOGE office failed to offer “any specific details as to why accessing its own records or submitting to two depositions would pose an unbearable burden,” the DC Circuit panel wrote in an unsigned order.