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On Tuesday, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal from the Trump administration challenging a lawsuit that seeks access to records stemming from Elon Musk’s time leading the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE).
DOGE was responsible for ripping through the budgets of several federal agencies last year, ostensibly in the name of cutting wasteful spending but oftentimes targeting spending priorities opposed by President Donald Trump and Musk. The initiative operated without congressional oversight.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which ran foreign aid projects around the world, faced the largest cuts. A former leading USAID administrator estimated over 700,000 deaths could be attributable to cuts made by DOGE from its beginning through July 2026.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit watchdog group, filed a lawsuit to access records relating to DOGE’s work, arguing that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) applied to DOGE. A federal judge agreed, and an appellate court confirmed the ruling. However, in June 2025, the Supreme Court intervened and sent the lawsuit back to the lower court to narrow the scope of open records requests.
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After the lawsuit began to advance again, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court to block it, arguing that the lower court decision “intrudes into the autonomy and confidentiality of presidential advisers and augurs time-consuming and burdensome discovery litigation.” The high court agreed to review the decision and to hear the case during this term, likely at the start of next year.
The Trump administration’s effort to keep information about DOGE hidden from the public is yet another example contradicting the president’s claims that he is “the most transparent” chief executive in U.S. history.
In a recent interview with The Economist, Musk said that he “got a little too involved in politics, got carried away, frankly.”
However, he appears to be back in the game: Musk has spent around $366 million in this year’s midterm election cycle in support of Republican candidates backing Trump’s MAGA agenda. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has also brought him on board a three-person panel that will examine the future of technology for the U.S. military – a tremendous conflict of interest, given that Musk regularly seeks (and is often granted) billion-dollar contracts with the government.
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