US judge says Musk’s DOGE must release records on operations run in ‘secrecy’

By Nate Raymond

(Reuters) -A federal judge on Monday ordered the government-downsizing team created by U.S. President Donald Trump and spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk to make public records concerning its operations, which he said had been run in “unusual secrecy.”

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington sided with the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in finding that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was likely an agency subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The ruling, the first of its kind, marked an early victory for advocates seeking to force DOGE to become more transparent about its role in the mass firings being conducted in the federal workforce and the dismantling of government agencies by the Republican president’s administration.

The Trump administration had argued that DOGE as an arm of the Executive Office of the President was not subject to FOIA, a law that allows the public to seek access to records produced by government agencies that they had not previously disclosed.

But Cooper, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, said that DOGE was exercising “substantial independent authority” much greater than the other components of that office that are usually exempt from FOIA’s requirements.

He said it “appears to have the power not just to evaluate federal programs, but to drastically reshape and even eliminate them wholesale,” a fact that the judge said the agency declined to refute.

He said its “operations thus far have been marked by unusual secrecy,” citing reports about DOGE’s use of an outside server, its employees refusal to identify themselves to career officials and their use of the encrypted app Signal to communicate.

The White House and CREW, the watchdog group, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Raju Gopalakrishnan)