The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to hear the Trump administration's appeal in a lawsuit that could force Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency to hand over internal records to a left-leaning watchdog group — and the stakes for anyone who wants the federal government cut down to size couldn't be higher.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, sued under the Freedom of Information Act to pry loose DOGE documents from the early days of Trump's second term. CREW insists DOGE is a federal agency and therefore subject to FOIA. The administration says it's a presidential advisory body — the kind Congress explicitly exempted from open-records demands when it wrote the law. If CREW wins, any advisory body advising a president becomes fair game for litigation-driven discovery, and the people who staff it spend their time producing documents for lawsuits instead of doing the work voters sent them to do.
This is the second time the high court has stepped in. Last June, the conservative majority reined in U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, who had ordered the government to turn over documents broadly. CNN noted that the three liberal justices dissented from that earlier move. Cooper and a subsequent appeals court panel still sided with CREW on narrower requests — including all "directives" from DOGE's acting administrator Amy Gleason to her employees, any plans to access classified information, and a sworn deposition of Gleason herself.
The Justice Department pushed back hard. "Subjecting advisory bodies to intrusive discovery triggers the very concerns that Congress sought to avoid by excluding presidential advisory bodies from FOIA's reach," DOJ attorneys wrote. They argue the appeals court blew past the Supreme Court's earlier warning about separation-of-powers concerns and invaded the "autonomy and confidentiality" of presidential advisers.
CREW, which CNN described as "left-leaning," claims the appeals court fully complied with the Supreme Court's earlier order and insists the public has a right to see how DOGE helped carry out a "sweeping overhaul of government operations in 2025." Its attorneys wrote that "undisputed facts in the public record — including the President's statements — confirmed that DOGE was wielding enormous independent authority across the federal government."
That framing tells you everything. CREW isn't seeking documents for sunlight's sake. It's building a case that DOGE exercised independent power — the very power the administrative state is desperate to reclaim. CNN acknowledged that DOGE "slashed agencies with unusual speed" and that the case raises "fundamental questions about the power and transparency" of the entity. But the real question is simpler: does a president have the right to get confidential advice from citizens without a lawsuit-enabled deposition tour? The founders would have called that executive privilege. CREW calls it a FOIA request. The Supreme Court will decide.
The open question: if CREW wins and every presidential advisory body is subject to FOIA, which future efficiency effort survives the lawsuit gauntlet?
