For months, the Trump administration has fended off legal challenges to DOGE’s sweeping interventions in federal governance by insisting that neither DOGE nor its de facto leader, Elon Musk, have real decision-making authority.
But a new court filing reveals the most compelling evidence yet that the government has been spinning a fiction in federal court.
The underlying case, Amica Center for Immigrant Rights v. United States Department of Justice, was brought by a network of legal aid groups that subcontract with the Acacia Center for Justice, which provides legal services for non-citizens and unaccompanied minor children.
All of which brings me to DOGE and the events that occurred at the Justice Department on April 3 and beyond. The excessively detailed account of those events presented below is based on administrative records, including internal Justice Department emails and documents, that were recently filed by the government in the Amica litigation. The new details contained therein, which have garnered little attention, suggest that DOGE directed senior Justice Department officials to terminate the Acacia Center’s contracts.
Lambert here: Complex timeline follows….
Later that evening, at 6:06 p.m., a Justice Management Division staffer named Tarak Makecha received an email from an official at the General Services Administration, an external agency.
Makecha, a former Tesla employee, has previously been identified as a DOGE associate by multiple media outlets. He has been linked to DOGE work at the Office of Personnel Management, the State Department, the FBI, and now the Justice Management Division at the Justice Department.
The sender of the “Acacia” email was Josh Gruenbaum, the Commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service at the General Services Administration. Gruenbaum, like Makecha, has been linked to DOGE.
In the body of the message, [Gruenbaum] pasted a list of contract ID numbers associated with Acacia Center programs. A document was also attached, titled “.” The email contained no further explanation or instruction.
Makecha, the former Tesla employee turned DOGE affiliate, forwarded the message to several Justice Department officials minutes later. One of the recipients included William N. Taylor, the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Policy, Management, and Procurement at the Justice Management Division. Taylor is a career official who has been employed at the Justice Department since 1994, according to his biography on the Justice Department’s website.
“See attached,” Makecha wrote to Taylor and others at 6:25 p.m. “Please execute this termination today and please forward me the termination email to confirm it went out so I can report completion to WH.”
Lambert here: QED.
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