The Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s bid to keep information about the inner workings of the Department of Government Efficiency from being disclosed to a watchdog group while litigation continues in the case.
Over dissent from the court’s three Democratic appointees, the order follows a temporary reprieve in DOGE’s favor on May 23 from Chief Justice John Roberts. Roberts’ administrative stay was in effect pending further word from him or the full court, which came Friday when the justices sent the case back to the lower court, reasoning that a judge’s order against DOGE was too broad.
The high court order was issued along with another order favoring DOGE in a separate case involving access to Social Security data.
In this watchdog case, the federal government argued that DOGE isn’t technically an agency and is therefore exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. The government argued that a district court judge in D.C. had turned FOIA “on its head” by ordering DOGE to “submit to sweeping, intrusive discovery just to determine if USDS [DOGE] is subject to FOIA in the first place.”
A federal appellate panel refused to halt the judge’s discovery order, and the administration appealed to the justices for emergency relief, as it has done in several cases during Donald Trump’s second term. The government urged the justices to reject what it called a “fishing expedition” into “sensitive executive-branch functions.” The watchdog group that brought the lawsuit, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, opposed DOGE’s urgent bid. CREW said the government was trying to prematurely get the justices to decide that DOGE isn’t an agency subject to FOIA, arguing that what’s at issue here is the “far narrower antecedent question: whether the court of appeals clearly and indisputably erred in refusing to disturb a district court order allowing limited discovery to ascertain DOGE’s agency status.” It said the government “has raised a fact-intensive legal issue supported by unreliable evidence, did so in a manner it was explicitly told would lead to discovery, and now needs to respond.” Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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