WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily allowed the Trump administration to shield Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from freedom of information requests seeking thousands of pages of material.
Chief Justice John Roberts issued an administrative stay that puts lower court decisions on hold while the Supreme Court considers what next steps to take.
For now, it means the government will not have to respond to requests for documents and allow for the deposition of the DOGE administrator, Amy Gleason, as a lower court had ruled.
At issue in the ongoing litigation is whether DOGE, which has played a key role in firing government workers and cutting federal grants and spending, is technically a government agency and therefore subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which allows members of the public to seek internal documents.
The Trump administration says that, despite its name, DOGE is merely a presidential advisory body that is not subject to public records requests under FOIA.
Further complicating matters, when DOGE was set up, it effectively took the place of a previous government entity called the U.S. Digital Service. The Trump administration now refers to the body as the U.S. DOGE Service, or USDS.
The case arose when watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) brought a freedom of information request in January soon after Trump took office seeking information about DOGE. CREW later filed suit.
In March, U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington ruled DOGE is “likely” covered by FOIA and that “the public would be irreparably harmed by an indefinite delay in unearthing the records CREW seeks.”
Cooper ordered DOGE to process CREW’s several FOIA requests for information on an “expedited timetable” and to begin producing documents on a rolling basis “as soon as practicable.” The court also ordered the government to preserve “all records” that may be responsive to CREW’s FOIA requests.
In addition to the more than 100,000 documents the Office of Management and Budget has that are responsive to the FOIA request ordered by Cooper, DOGE itself said it has approximately 58,000 documents responsive to the request.
The documents in question all relate back to the question of whether DOGE is a government agency.
CREW’s lawyers said in court papers said that Cooper had merely issued a “narrowly-tailored discovery order” to ascertain whether DOGE is a federal agency. The Supreme Court, they added, “rarely intervenes in ongoing discovery disputes” and there was “no basis for such extraordinary intervention here.”
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