President-elect Donald Trump listens to Elon Musk as he arrives to watch SpaceX’s mega rocket Starship lift off for a test flight from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, Nov. 19, 2024 (Brandon Bell/Pool via AP, File).
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will quickly appeal a court order aimed at prying open the internal structure of the beleaguered pseudo-agency helmed by Elon Musk, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a late Thursday court filing.
In a 13-page ruling handed down on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, a Barack Obama appointee, directed titular U.S. DOGE Service Administrator Amy Gleason to sit for a deposition. The group was also ordered to provide certain documents and answer limited questions issued by nonpartisan government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
The underlying lawsuit is an effort to enforce Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests against the Trump administration’s intra-governmental fraud-and-waste-focused organization. DOGE, in turn, has maintained “it is not an agency subject to FOIA,” Cooper noted.
The court disagreed and entered an injunction requiring expedited processing of CREW’s FOIA requests against DOGE. The plaintiffs then moved for summary judgment on the lawsuit and, seeking a quick bit of finality, moved for expedited discovery.
Cooper’s Tuesday order largely gave CREW what they wanted – while denying one deposition request. The defendants, in a motion to stay, insist that even the limited relief is far too much to bear.
“First, [DOGE’s] Administrator would be diverted from her significant duties and burdened in both preparing and sitting for a deposition, all of which may ultimately prove to be unnecessary,” the government’s filing reads. “The same is true of the discovery more generally.”
To that end, DOGE says they will, on Friday, use the somewhat unusual method of filing a petition for a writ of mandamus with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit “requesting that the Court of Appeals vacate” the lower court’s discovery order.
A mandamus petition is, however, not exactly an appeal. It is an attempt to have one court force another entity within the government to do something – or to force itself to correct a mistake.
“[DOGE] thus hereby moves this Court to stay the Discovery Order pending the D.C. Circuit’s disposition of the mandamus petition [DOGE] expects to file tomorrow,” the government’s motion reads. “CREW opposes this requested relief. Should the Court not grant a stay of the Order by 11:00 a.m. tomorrow, [DOGE] intend to also seek a stay from the D.C. Circuit, as well as an immediate administrative stay.”
The government’s motion does not explicitly say why the defendants are seeking the unusual form of relief but hints that they expect to be able to win their case quickly due to the nature of the tool.
“CREW will not suffer any irreparable harm from the minor delay of a stay pending highly expedited mandamus review,” the motion argues.
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In response to Gleason’s deposition, the government says the court’s order “intrudes substantially” on the executive branch.
“Gleason is not only the head of an Executive Branch component, but head of an Executive Office of the President component,” the motion continues. “Expedited discovery itself is an exception to the ordinary rules of civil litigation, and the depositions of high-ranking government officials are an exception even beyond that.”
In regard to some of those court-ordered document productions, DOGE complained their staff would be more or less overwhelmed.
“Absent a stay [DOGE] would be required, within the next five days to, among other things, attempt to identify every recommendation it or any of its employees has made on broad subjects and either disclose the substance of those recommendations to CREW, or analyze and assert privilege as to a potentially broad swathe of material,” the motion goes on. “And it must do so, while also processing 1,000 pages of documents to comply with the Court’s attendant order directing processing of FOIA records, while the Court considers whether [DOGE] is actually subject to FOIA in the first place.”
The government also says their compliance with the court order would lead to “irreparable harm” while CREW has nothing to lose from a brief stay of the discovery demands.
“To the extent [DOGE] is required to undertake this burdensome search process (or produce any documents or information) pursuant to the Court’s Discovery Order, it would likewise be impossible to reverse the resulting harm if the Court of Appeals vacates that order or narrows the discovery this Court has directed,” the motion continues.
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In a quick response placed on the federal court docket, Cooper ordered CREW to respond to the government’s arguments by Friday.
Jerry Lambe and Marisa Sarnoff contributed to this report.
