The Trump administration asked the US Supreme Court to block a government watchdog group from questioning a senior official and obtaining internal records about the Department of Government Efficiency project once led by Elon Musk.
CREW is demanding government records about DOGE under the federal Freedom of Information Act. The Trump administration argues that DOGE is not an “agency” covered by the transparency law.
Lambert here: Why, it’s almost as if DOGE was designed to evade checks and balances!
Before reaching that core question, a judge in Washington gave CREW permission to gather evidence about how DOGE has operated — including making its administrator Amy Gleason available to testify under oath at a deposition. The administration has been fighting that step for months.
Lawyers in the US solicitor general’s office wrote in the new petition that the lower courts’ handling of the dispute “intrudes into the autonomy and confidentiality of presidential advisors and augurs time-consuming and burdensome discovery litigation.”
A CREW spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a 6-3 order last June, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority issued a brief, unsigned order that tossed out lower court decisions permitting CREW to get the information that it wanted. The court wrote that whether a federal agency is covered by FOIA “cannot turn on the entity’s ability to persuade,” so it wasn’t appropriate to compel the administration to disclose information about DOGE’s “recommendations” within the executive branch and whether they were followed.
The justices also wrote that “separation of powers concerns counsel judicial deference and restraint in the context of discovery regarding internal Executive Branch communications.”
CREW pulled back its requests for information about the DOGE office’s “recommendations” but continued to press for details about its structure, functions and decisions that it “directed” as opposed to “recommended.” A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit refused to disturb CREW’s revised request in July, and the full appeals court declined to revisit that decision in mid-December.
The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to consider the merits of the case and so far hasn’t asked the justices to immediately intervene on an emergency basis.
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