WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to the Trump administration’s attempt to block a watchdog group from seeking information about the Department of Government Efficiency, which played a key role in firing thousands of federal workers and defunding government funding.
The court agreed to hear a Justice Department appeal to block Citizens for Accountability and Ethics in Washington from obtaining records under the Freedom of Information Act. The judgment should be rendered by the end of June.
The Trump administration has argued that DOGE, led by former administrative adviser Elon Musk, is not subject to so-called FOIA requests.
DOGE, which played a key role in dismantling the US Agency for International Development, was a controversial element of Trump’s early months in office, sparking various lawsuits. Since then, its operations have declined.
The case had already been brought before the Supreme Court at an earlier stage of the litigation. Then, in a tentative ruling, the court blocked parts of a lower court ruling that required the release of thousands of pages of information.
This also meant that the plaintiffs’ lawyers could not remove Amy Gleason, the DOGE administrator.
Litigation has since continued. Following the Supreme Court’s earlier intervention, the plaintiffs restricted their requests for information, but the government still objected. After losing in the lower courts, Solicitor General D. John Sauer again asked the justices for their opinion.
Requests for information remained pending while the case unfolded.
The plaintiffs say the information they still want concerns DOGE’s advice to its workers on canceling contracts and firing civil servants. None of these requests relate to communications with the White House that might be prohibited under FOIA, they say.
A key question lurking in the case is whether DOGE is technically a government agency and therefore subject to FOIA, which allows members of the public to search internal documents.
The Trump administration claims that, despite its name, DOGE is only a presidential advisory body that is not subject to public records requests under FOIA.
To further complicate matters, when DOGE was created, it effectively replaced a previous government entity called the US Digital Service. The Trump administration now calls this organization the US DOGE Service, or USDS.
Shortly after Trump took office in January 2025, CREW filed a FOIA request requesting information about DOGE. The group then filed a complaint.
In March 2025, Judge Christopher Cooper of the U.S. District Court in Washington ruled that DOGE was “likely” covered by FOIA, saying “the public would be irreparably harmed by an indefinite delay in discovering the records sought by CREW.”
The documents in question all refer to the question of whether DOGE is a government agency.
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