The Supreme Court said Tuesday it will hear a case involving President Trump’s attempt to block a liberal watchdog group from obtaining documents about the internal workings of DOGE, the White House’s now-defunct cost-cutting initiative.
The Justice Department had asked the justices to take the case, saying that when lower courts approved intrusive scrutiny into the Department of Government Efficiency, they trampled on the president’s powers.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a left-leaning watchdog group, had sought the documents in an open-records request under the Freedom of Information Act.
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But Mr. Trump argued that DOGE, created within the White House and run for a time by special presidential adviser Elon Musk, was largely immune to FOIA.
CREW wants to litigate that claim — but argued that, to do so, it needs more information on how DOGE actually operated. It sought legal discovery.
The Trump administration said the information CREW is seeking in discovery is pretty much the same thing it was seeking by FOIA. Solicitor General D. John Sauer had told the justices not to let CREW use discovery as an end-run to get ahold of information that would otherwise be protected as presidential papers.
“Permitting discovery into sensitive presidential advice to determine whether that advice is exempt from FOIA would inflict the very separation-of-powers harms that the exemption is meant to avoid,” he said in a filing earlier this year asking the high court to take the case.
He said given the proliferation of similar DOGE cases working their way through the courts, it was time the justices settled what DOGE was, and where it stood in the government bureaucracy.
It took at least four justices’ agreement to bring the case to the docket.
It should be heard during the current term, which opened earlier this month and runs into next summer.
The case had been before the justices in a tentative posture.
At that time, the court ruled that lower courts were in danger of crossing lines on separation of powers.
The justices sent the case back to lower courts with orders to more thoroughly examine the president’s prerogatives at stake.
DOGE was at the forefront of the early second Trump administration’s efforts to slash the federal bureaucracy.
But whether it was pulling the strings or merely making recommendations has always been debated.
The White House argued that DOGE was an advisory panel to the president and lacked any formal decision-making authority.
That would likely put it beyond the reach of FOIA.
CREW argued — and U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, an Obama appointee, agreed — that DOGE was covered by FOIA.
Complicating the situation is the manner of DOGE’s creation.
It was never a department in the formal sense of a Cabinet-level branch such as the Justice, Labor or Energy departments.
Indeed, the government argues that it was the successor to a little-known White House office, the U.S. Digital Service. It now refers to DOGE as the U.S. DOGE Service, or USDS, maintaining the acronym of the former office.
CREW had urged the justices to reject the case and leave lower court orders in place. That would have directed the government to turn over the documents CREW is now seeking in legal discovery, and allowed deposition of a DOGE official, Amy Gleason, who was at one point the acting administrator of DOGE.
Those have been blocked while the case has developed.
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