Judge Rules DOGE Is Likely Subject To Transparency Laws

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is so massive that it should “likely” be subject to laws allowing outsiders to peer into government records, a federal judge ruled Monday.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper said in his ruling that the public could potentially be “irreparably harmed” by any “indefinite delay” of records requested of DOGE by the public watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW.

CREW sued the agency last month along with the Office of Management and Budget, arguing that mostly “unidentified actors” at DOGE were improperly taking the reins of government operations and firing people without any meaningful oversight or transparency into their day-to-day conduct or decision-making.

This, CREW alleged, violated provisions in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) as well as the Federal Records Act. While OMB had agreed to start producing records to CREW, DOGE had flat-out refused, saying that as an entity, it simply wasn’t subject to FOIA laws.

Government attorneys have argued that DOGE is a “free-standing component” that acts in an advisory capacity and reports to the White House Chief of Staff, therefore making it “not subject to FOIA.”

Cooper disagreed, writing that reports of the “unprecedented access to sensitive personal and classified data and payment systems across federal agencies” by DOGE would very much suggest the organization should be subject to transparency laws.

Reports that DOGE employees have “refused to identify themselves when requested to do so by career officials, further suggest[s] that the agency is operating with unusual secrecy,” Cooper wrote. All of this and more gives rise to the possibility that representatives of DOGE “may not fully appreciate their obligations to preserve federal records,” the ruling states.

DOGE staffers may not, “to put it charitably,” the judge wrote, “be steeped in its document retention policies” for the government.

“That being said, the Court need not make a finding of bad faith in order to enter a document preservation order,” Cooper wrote, adding that DOGE would need to start producing some of the records requested by CREW on a rolling basis.

The order to preserve records is also critical because of the “rapid pace” of DOGE’s actions in over the last month, the judge wrote. Agencies siloed inside of the Executive Office of the President, or EOP — as government lawyers suggest DOGE now is — are typically not subject to FOIA laws. Trump administration lawyers fending off CREW’s lawsuit have argued that Musk and DOGE serve in something like an advisory capacity for the president.

This murky line was not one Cooper was ready to toe in his ruling.

Both Musk and Trump have made public statements indicating that DOGE is exercising “substantial independent authority,” Cooper wrote.

In fact, from its inception, Trump envisioned that DOGE would have “the power to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies,” the judge noted, citing a post Trump made to X last November.

Musk has also told the press he has the power to decide what regulations will be chopped and he has said openly that the federal budget would be reduced by $2 trillion thanks to DOGE.

“Presumably, such a staggering result would require more than mere advice,” Cooper wrote before citing Musk’s own words from just weeks ago.

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk wrote on X on Feb. 3.

Trump’s praise of Musk publicly for finding “fake contracts” and Trump’s reported orders to his Cabinet secretaries to cooperate with DOGE on mass firings and staffing were also flagged by the judge.

“These statements and reports suggest that the President and [DOGE] leadership view the department as wielding decision-making authority to make cuts across the federal government,” the ruling states.

The swirling mystery of DOGE operations and the way it appears to pick and choose when it is a federal agency and when it is not struck the judge so significantly that, tucked away in a footnote of his ruling, he openly considered what strategy may be at play.

“In other briefing before courts in this district, [DOGE] has argued that it qualifies as an agency — for instance, for purposes of the Economy Act — when it suits it,” Cooper wrote, pointing to a lawsuit brought against DOGE and the Department of Labor by the AFL-CIO.

In that case, DOGE argued it was an agency.

DOGE, in its view, then becomes a “Goldilocks entity,” Cooper noted, “not an agency when it is burdensome but an agency when it is convenient.”

It is expected that lawyers for the government will appeal Cooper’s ruling. A request for comment from the White House was not immediately returned Tuesday.