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Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has taken unprecedented steps to slash the federal bureaucracy, all but dismantling entire agencies and firing thousands of workers while claiming to have saved the federal government over a hundred billion dollars— even if, critics say, that calculation doesn’t remotely hold up. Musk—the head of DOGE, at least according to Donald Trump, at least sometimes—says that DOGE operates in complete transparency. “There should be no need for FOIA requests,” he tweeted in November, referring to the Freedom of Information Act, a law that gives the public the right to request information from the federal government. But despite its avowed “transparency,” DOGE has refused to answer FOIA requests from journalists and watchdog groups. As reported by the New York Times and others, Musk and his advisers intentionally positioned DOGE within the Executive Office of the President, in what looked like an obvious attempt to shield it from laws like FOIA.
This week, however, that apparent strategy failed to hold up in court. On Monday, a federal judge ruled that DOGE is likely subject to FOIA; in a thirty-seven-page statement, the judge cited the initiative’s “unprecedented” influence and “unusual secrecy,” arguing that the rapid pace of its actions requires the quick release of information about its structure and activities. The ruling came in response to a case brought by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, which sued DOGE last month over its refusal to process a FOIA request. (Yesterday, a different judge ordered Musk and DOGE to turn over records and answer questions in response to a legal complaint filed by Democratic state attorneys general, as part of a discovery process.) The Monday ruling could very well be appealed, but it was a win for journalists, watchdogs, and researchers who have demanded greater transparency. As the past months have shown, extracting even basic facts about DOGE’s operation and structure is a burdensome task: government lawyers had to be dragged to court after refusing to disclose who the DOGE administrator is (eventually, the White House pointed to Amy Gleason, a former healthcare executive, as the acting administrator), and Musk has flip-flopped on whether DOGE’s staff members are paid.
Despite the lack of easy access to DOGE’s internal operations, countless news outlets have extensively covered its staffing cuts, budget claims, and transparency disputes. The judge in the FOIA case cited such reporting as supporting evidence that DOGE is leading the charge on the mass firings and termination of federal programs, rather than merely advising others to carry them out. For instance, he cited an ABC article that pointed out that emails sent to federal employees with deferred resignation offers used the subject line “Fork in the Road”—the same wording that Musk used when he slashed jobs at X, then known as Twitter, after taking the company over, in 2022. The judge also highlighted reports that some federal workers communicate primarily on the encrypted app Signal. In light of this, he ordered DOGE to preserve all documents, citing “the possibility that representatives of the Defendant entities may not fully appreciate their obligations to preserve federal records.”
News outlets have also gathered the names and backgrounds of DOGE’s employees. Wired arguably led the way with its early reporting in this area. Last month, the Times identified more than fifty people tasked with carrying out Musk’s plans at DOGE, and found that many of them are young men with backgrounds in the artificial intelligence industry. “Musk’s team has taken aim at more than 20 agencies while gaining access to sensitive government data systems,” the Times wrote. “But the full extent of its reach or ambitions is unclear.” Ryan Mac, one of the reporters of the piece, added on Bluesky that “the public has a right to know who is dismantling the government.” Similar efforts could be seen last week at The Intercept, which, citing a source, published Musk’s government email address, announcing that the outlet plans to use it to sharpen FOIA requests aimed at revealing his correspondence. Without the email address, the outlet argued, requests for Musk’s communications with federal agencies risk being rejected by the government, which “sometimes plays games with journalists, researchers, and other watchdogs” by claiming that requests aren’t specific enough. (For those wondering, the email address is reportedly erm71@who.eop.gov.) Following publication, users on social media put together spreadsheets containing what they believe to be the email addresses of other members of the DOGE team, encouraging a “FOIA party.”
Although DOGE is now facing legal pressure to be more transparent, any actual disclosure of records may proceed at a sluggish pace. A lawyer for the government said that it could take officials three years to produce all the documents requested by CREW, even on an expedited basis. This, in itself, speaks volumes to how much DOGE has done in the first two months of this administration. FOIA offices were already understaffed and under-budgeted, and the mass firing of federal employees is clearly putting pressure on an already strained system. As CNN reported last month, the Trump administration has quietly fired multiple members of the privacy team and other officials, including staff who handle FOIA requests from the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees the employment of federal workers. Upon filing a FOIA request asking for the security clearances of Musk and DOGE staffers who had been granted access to secure information, CNN received the following response from an OPM email address: “Good luck with that they just got rid of the entire privacy team.”
This all raises the question of whether other FOIA officers may be at risk of termination, and what that could mean for the government’s transparency requirements in the next four years. Yet DOGE’s secretive actions and apparent willingness to jump through hoops to avoid transparency laws demonstrates just how crucial it is for journalists to continue reporting on the initiative’s activities—with or without FOIA on their side. As shown by Monday’s ruling, such reporting can help drive change. With DOGE’s FOIA door slightly ajar, now is an opportune time to push.
Other notable stories:
- CJR’s Sewell Chan and Betsy Morais report that Wesley Lowery—a prominent former Washington Post journalist and influential critic of the traditional understanding of journalistic “objectivity”—has left his posts as the executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop, which pairs students with investigative journalists to work on projects for publication, and as an associate professor of journalism at American University following “a number of complaints against him, according to former colleagues, including at least three Title IX allegations, in which he was accused of improper behavior with colleagues and female students.” In an interview with CJR, Lowery acknowledged the complaints but “insisted that he did nothing wrong and said that he left his job voluntarily to return to reporting and writing.”
- Ruth Marcus—an editor and columnist who quit the Washington Post, where she had worked for forty years, earlier this week after the paper’s publisher spiked a column in which she took issue with an edict from Jeff Bezos, the owner, reorienting the opinion section around “personal liberties and free markets”—explained her decision to resign in an essay for The New Yorker, which also published the spiked column. “The column was, if anything, meek to the point of embarrassing,” Marcus writes, but she wanted “not only to be true to myself but to show that the newspaper could brook criticism and that columnists still enjoyed freedom of expression.” In the end, it turned out, “the Washington Post I joined, the one I came to love, is not the Washington Post I left.”
- Yesterday, an arbitrator ordered Sarah Wynn-Williams—a former staffer at Meta who recently published an explosive memoir detailing her time at the company, including allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of senior executives—to stop promoting and distributing the book after Meta complained that it breached a nondisparagement clause in a contract she had signed. (Meta has vigorously denied Wynn-Williams’s claims.) So far, however, the ruling appears not to have stopped the book’s publisher—Flatiron, which is owned by Macmillan—from distributing it, and, as the Times notes, Meta has previously pledged not to punish staffers for speaking up about sexual wrongdoing.
- In the UK, the BBC is preparing to urge the government to take on the full costs of funding the World Service—which broadcasts in countries around the world, but has been hamstrung of late by budget shortfalls—on the grounds that it is currently being hugely outmatched by the global operations of Russian and Chinese state broadcasters. The Guardian’s Michael Savage notes that the request represents an “early skirmish” in negotiations with the government over the BBC’s status—and that the government might be reluctant to find the money due to its strict, if self-imposed, fiscal rules.
- And CJR’s Feven Merid checked in on Wikipedia editors in New York amid a growing right-wing campaign against the site (which we also covered recently in this newsletter). “If you meet three Wikipedia editors, you’d feel better about the long-standing stamina of Wikipedia,” one said. “Like, if you see all these editors, you’re just like, Oh, these are the people who are trying to make sure that Wikipedia is going to remain not just intact, but that we’re going to keep telling this evolving story of the internet.”
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