This article was updated on May 21 at 2:38 p.m.
The Trump administration came to the Supreme Court on Wednesday morning, once again asking the justices to take action on their emergency docket. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the court to temporarily pause an order by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that would require the Department of Government Efficiency to provide information in a lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act. Sauer told the justices that requiring DOGE as a “presidential advisory body” to respond to the plaintiffs’ requests, a process known as discovery, “clearly violates the separation of powers” and “will significantly distract” from DOGE’s “mission of identifying and eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse in the federal government.”
Chief Justice John Roberts instructed CREW to file a response to the government’s request by noon on Friday, May 23.
President Donald Trump created DOGE on Jan. 20 to “further the President’s agenda by ‘modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.’” DOGE is not a cabinet-level department but has had sweeping involvement in the president’s efforts to shrink the federal government across agencies since he took office.
The Trump administration’s request on Wednesday stems from a Jan. 24 request made under FOIA by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group. CREW sought, among other things, communications between the DOGE administrator, Amy Gleason, and DOGE staff, as well as financial disclosures submitted by DOGE personnel.
On Feb. 20, CREW filed a lawsuit under FOIA in federal court in Washington, D.C. It sought documents that, according to CREW, it wanted before Congress passed a bill to fund the federal government.
As the case comes to the court on Wednesday, it centers on CREW’s request for expedited discovery to determine whether DOGE is an “agency” that must comply with FOIA. CREW asked to depose Gleason as well as for a list of government contracts and grants that DOGE recommended be canceled, a list of employees and positions that DOGE recommended be terminated, and a list of current and former DOGE employees.
U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper largely granted CREW’s request, including the request to depose Gleason, and instructed DOGE to respond quickly.
In an order on May 14, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined to pause Cooper’s order, calling the discovery order “narrow” and “modest.”
Sauer came to the Supreme Court one week later, asking the justices to intervene. He told them that Cooper had “granted expedited, intrusive discovery into a presidential advisory body to address whether that advisory body is exempt from FOIA.” Such an order, he emphasized, gives CREW “a significant part of the information it would obtain were it to prevail on the merits of its FOIA arguments,” and it “offends the separation of powers by compromising the ‘necessity’ for confidentiality that allows presidential advisors to provide ‘candid, objective’ advice and communication.”
The justices are already considering another emergency appeal involving DOGE: On May 2, the Trump administration asked the justices to pause an order by a federal judge in Baltimore that temporarily restricts DOGE team members from accessing the records of the Social Security Administration, access which challengers argue could expose the personal data of millions of Americans. The court has not yet acted on that appeal.
Posted in Emergency appeals and applications, Featured