Trump just got the DOGE secrecy fight he wanted in front of the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026, to hear a bid by President Donald Trump’s administration to withhold records from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the operation former administration adviser Elon Musk spearheaded.
A watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), sued for records from DOGE’s work in the early days of Trump’s second term, and the Justice Department’s appeal in that suit brought the case, CREW v. DOGE Service, to the court. The outcome could decide how much the public ever learns about the inner workings of the now-defunct DOGE.
The administration asked the justices to take the case, and their agreement decides nothing about who wins. The arguments will turn on whether, and how far, discovery can proceed.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) sits at the heart of the dispute: does it cover DOGE as a federal agency? CREW says it is. The administration says DOGE was a presidential advisory body that the law does not reach. A ruling is due by the end of the term, in late June or early July 2027, and the argument date is not yet clear.
A FOIA Request Never Answered
CREW filed its FOIA request on Jan. 24, 2025, asking for records that would show how DOGE was structured and what it was telling other agencies. The documents never came, so the group sued.
CREW announced the lawsuit on Feb. 20, 2025. Noah Bookbinder, the group’s president, said the U.S. DOGE Service and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) were acting as if the records law did not apply to them, and that it does.
Cooper’s Order Called Too Broad
The dispute has reached the justices once before. Discovery could proceed, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper held on April 15, 2025, from the bench of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. His decision went CREW’s way and directed the government to move faster on the group’s records request, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit panel that reviewed it came down on CREW’s side too.
An emergency appeal followed from the Justice Department in May 2025. On May 23, 2025, the justices paused the discovery orders, and on June 6, 2025, the conservative majority found Cooper had ruled too broadly. The court said requests about what DOGE recommended, and whether agencies followed those recommendations, were “not appropriately tailored.”
CREW trimmed its requests after that. The government objected anyway.
Amy Gleason, DOGE’s acting administrator, could then be deposed under oath by CREW’s lawyers after the appeals court cleared the way. According to the administration, the panel had no authority to permit that, and the judges skipped over a Supreme Court instruction to weigh separation-of-powers concerns while cutting into the independence and confidentiality of presidential advisers. Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that the appeals court’s ruling “intrudes into the autonomy and confidentiality of presidential advisors.”
CREW says the appeals court did exactly what the Supreme Court told it to do. CREW’s lawyers wrote, pointing at the president’s own words, that public records including Trump’s statements show DOGE was “wielding enormous independent authority across the federal government.”
Nikhel Sus, CREW’s chief counsel, told Politico: “The lower courts have uniformly ruled that CREW is entitled to discovery in this case.” He added, “We will continue to pursue transparency for the American people.”
Discovery Is the Only Way
Margaret Kwoka, the Frank R. Strong Chair in Law at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, who joined a brief supporting CREW as an outside legal expert, said: “Because so much about how DOGE operated … was not publicly explained, discovery is the only way to unearth key facts about DOGE’s operations and exercises of authority.”
“Those details will illuminate whether it is in fact exercising independent authority or whether it is acting as an advisor to the President,” Kwoka said in a separate passage.
Ryan Mulvey, a senior policy counsel at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, said the stakes run deeper than the discovery fight: “The fight ultimately in the DOGE case, and what CREW was hoping to test with its litigation, was whether DOGE [is] subject to FOIA.”
A Law Johnson Signed in 1966
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed FOIA into law in 1966, and the statute handed the public the right to ask any federal agency for its records. Johnson said at the signing that he hoped the government would weigh national security, personal privacy and confidential deliberations against the benefit of a well-informed public.
An associate professor at Georgetown Law who previously served as deputy chief counsel at American Oversight, Sara Creighton said the law rests on the belief that a democracy depends on citizens who know what their government is doing. She said the current question before the court is discovery, and warned that a Supreme Court ruling that DOGE is not subject to FOIA would carry implications beyond this administration. “Whether an entity is subject to FOIA really determines how much information the public gets to know about it, and whether [entities] have any obligation to disclose their documents to the public,” she said.
Thousands of federal workers lost their jobs with DOGE’s help, government funding was canceled and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was dismantled, drawing a string of lawsuits during Trump’s early months back in office. Experts say the ruling could shape government transparency far beyond this one case.
