Trump Admin Again Asks Supreme Court to Halt Lower Courts’ Inquiries Into DOGE

The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to halt lower courts’ attempts to access information about the inner workings of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The Supreme Court intervened in the case last year, ruling that lower courts’ orders for the government to turn over information about the department’s activities were overbroad. An appeals court has since asked for less information, but the government told the Supreme Court on March 23 that the requests were still intruding too much on executive branch powers.

“The court of appeals has continued to approve intrusive discovery against a presidential advisory body without adequate consideration for the separation of powers, the FOIA statute, and this Court’s previous order,” the government’s filing read.

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued DOGE last year, after its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests were not honored.

The government has argued that DOGE is an advisory arm of the executive branch—not an agency—and is not required to submit to FOIA inquiries. But a district court in Washington ruled differently, and ordered DOGE to comply with those inquiries.

When the government resisted, Citizens for Responsibility asked the judge to order discovery into whether DOGE “wields substantial authority independent of the president and is therefore subject to FOIA.”

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper did so last April. Although he didn’t give Citizens for Responsibility everything they asked for, he did order DOGE Administrator Amy Gleason to answer the court’s questions about the operation.

He also asked for information on DOGE teams embedded in federal agencies, what recommendations DOGE made to those agencies, who operated as administrators, and which federal databases DOGE accessed.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied the government’s request to halt Cooper’s order the next month, on the grounds that it violated the separation of powers. The discovery request was “modest in scope” and did not “target the president or any close adviser personally,” the appeals court found.

The government then appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the court’s information requests were too broad, and intruded on the executive branch’s power. In an unsigned 6-3 order, it also ruled that questions about whether DOGE is an “agency” subject to FOIA requests can’t be decided by the strength or weakness of the government’s arguments on the matter.

The case was kicked back to the appeals court, with instructions to “take appropriate action to narrow the April 15 discovery order” to align with the Supreme Court decision.

Although the appeals court did scale back some of the discovery requests—it’s no longer asking about DOGE’s recommendations to agencies—it interpreted the Supreme Court’s order to mean that other requests were valid.

The government is arguing that interpretation is too narrow, and “faithful application of the Supreme Court’s order compels the conclusion that, to the extent any discovery is appropriate at all, it must be exceedingly limited.”

The Epoch Times reached out to the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington for comment.