The Supreme Court will hear a case on whether the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has to release extensive records of deliberations on cutting government spending.
The Trump administration is challenging a lower court’s sweeping discovery order against DOGE despite a previous Supreme Court ruling to narrow the order. The administration argues that the department is exempt from public records law as a White House advisory board.
Liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed the initial lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act seeking records of DOGE deliberations on spending cuts. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, an appointee of President Barack Obama, in March 2025 ordered the administration to preserve the DOGE records and required expedited processing of the records request.
The administration sued to reverse the order in the case of U.S. DOGE Service v. United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and the Supreme Court in June 2025 directed the district court to narrow the discovery order in the case. The high court ruled that portions of the discovery order were not appropriately tailored and said separation-of-powers concerns require judicial restraint when seeking internal executive branch communications.
The watchdog narrowed its inquiry, and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals again sided with the group in a rehearing request by the administration in light of the Supreme Court ruling.
Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in a petition to the Supreme Court that “the court of appeals largely reinstated that discovery order in two sentences of cursory analysis that again side stepped the separation of powers.”
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“Allowing the decision below to stand and far-reaching discovery to proceed would sow mischief in countless future cases against high-ranking officials,” Sauer wrote.
The Trump administration contends that DOGE was exempt from the public records law as it was not a federal agency subject to FOIA. Although named as a “department,” DOGE was not created through an act of Congress like other federal agencies such as the Justice Department or State Department. In January 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that renamed the existing U.S. Digital Service office in the White House as the U.S. DOGE Service.
However, filings by the liberal watchdog group warned future administrations could simply recategorize an agency.
“Under the government’s proposed test, a President wishing to evade FOIA could simply ‘informally delegat[e] authority’ to an entity within the [executive office of the president] by non-public memorandum, or draft intentionally ambiguous executive orders,” lawyers for the watchdog groups wrote in their brief to the Supreme Court.
The high court will likely hear arguments in the case in early 2027 and rule on the matter in the summer.
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