The US Supreme Court has agreed for a second time to hear arguments in CREW's lawsuit seeking public records from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, with the Trump administration asking the court to intervene. The core legal dispute is deceptively simple: is DOGE a federal agency subject to the Freedom of Information Act, or a presidential advisory body exempt from its requirements? The answer will determine whether the public has any legal right to see what DOGE actually did. The case has already produced a telling procedural trail. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in CREW's favour and ordered expedited processing of records requests. An appeals court panel sided with CREW as well. Last year, the Supreme Court's conservative majority reined in Cooper's order, concluding he ruled too broadly — but did not resolve the underlying classification question. Now the administration wants the court to go further, arguing the appeals panel ignored separation-of-powers concerns and intruded on the "autonomy and confidentiality" of presidential advisers. The Trump administration's legal strategy is straightforward: label DOGE an advisory body and invoke the FOIA exemption Congress created for such bodies. "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 lawyers wrote. The administration also objects to the appeals court authorising a sworn deposition of DOGE acting administrator Amy Gleason. CREW's argument rests on the observable record. "Undisputed facts in the public record — including the President's statements — confirmed that [DOGE] was wielding enormous independent authority across the federal government," CREW's lawyers wrote. The group asserts the lower courts fully complied with the Supreme Court's previous order and that the public has a right to know how DOGE helped carry out a sweeping overhaul of government operations in 2025. The factual backdrop makes the classification question harder for the administration. DOGE claimed to have slashed tens of billions of dollars in expenditures, but those claims proved difficult for outside financial experts to verify. Federal auditors at the Government Accountability Office found that some of DOGE's reported savings across contract, grant, and lease terminations were incorrect, lacked supporting evidence, or included terminations already under way before DOGE existed. An entity wielding that kind of authority while resisting basic disclosure requests looks less like an advisory body and more like an agency operating without the accountability framework Congress intended. The legal precedent at stake extends well beyond DOGE. If the court rules that entities performing agency-level functions can avoid FOIA by being labelled "advisory," future administrations have a template for conducting government operations in the dark. The classification question is really a power question: can the executive branch create bodies that spend public money, cancel public contracts, and restructure public institutions while claiming the disclosure rules don't apply? CREW lawyer Nikhel Sus framed the stakes plainly: "We will continue to pursue transparency for the American people, who deserve to know the details of the Trump Administration's efforts to unilaterally remake the federal government." The court's ruling will determine whether that transparency is a legal right or a political favour.
