In both her March 14 and March 19 declarations submitted in the CREW FOIA case [docket], purported DOGE Administrator Amy Gleason described that DOGE’s job was — in addition to the technology modernization function the original USDS was tasked with — to advance President Trump’s 18-month “DOGE agenda.”

19. As described in the USDS Order, USDS is charged with furthering President’s Trump DOGE agenda, by “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”

20. In furtherance of these efforts, the USDS Order directs the USDS Administrator to work with agency heads to “promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization.”

21. In addition, the USDS Order charges the DOGE Service Temporary Organization with advancing President Trump’s 18 month “DOGE agenda,” as set forth in various Executive Orders. See ¶¶ 7, 24.

She describes the “DOGE agenda,” which she says stems from four Executive Orders and one Presidential Memorandum, this way:

24. The “DOGE agenda” includes the technology modernization efforts described in the USDS Order, as well as initiatives that are described in four separate Executive Orders and a presidential memorandum. These materials describe distinct—and limited—roles for USDS and agency heads and agency DOGE Teams. They include:

a. Executive Order 14,170, Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service (Jan. 20, 2025), which directs the USDS Administrator to consult with the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and the OMB Director on a federal hiring plan that focuses on hiring highly skilled Americans. The order charges the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy with actually developing the plan and disseminating it to agency heads.

b. Presidential Memorandum, Hiring Freeze (Jan. 20, 2025), which instructs the USDS Administrator to consult with the OMB Director, who is responsible for submitting a “plan to reduce the size of the Federal Government’s workforce through efficiency improvements and attrition.” The USDS Administrator is also responsible for consulting with the OMB Director and the Treasury Secretary, who is responsible for determining when to lift the hiring freeze at the Internal Revenue Service.

c. Executive Order 14,210, Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Workforce Optimization (Feb. 11, 2025), which directs agency heads to reduce agency headcount and agency DOGE Team Leads to provide monthly reports to the USDS Administrator on agency hiring. The USDS Administrator is also directed to report to the President on agencies’ compliance with the order.

d. Executive Order 14,218, Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Open Borders (Feb. 19, 2025), which requires the USDS Administrator to consult with the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and the OMB Director to identify sources of federal funding for illegal immigrants and collectively recommend agency actions to align spending with the purposes of the order and, where relevant, enhance eligibility verification systems.

e. Executive Order 14,219, Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Deregulatory Initiative (Feb. 19, 2025), which requires agency heads, in consultation with their DOGE Teams Leads, to undertake deregulatory efforts.

f. Executive Order, 14,222, Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Cost Efficiency Initiative, (Feb. 26, 2025), which requires each agency head to make federal expenditures transparent and for DOGE Team Leads to report to the USDS Administrator on contracting and non-essential travel expenses.

25. Cumulatively, these orders and memorandum set forth the responsibilities assigned to USDS, the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization, agency DOGE Teams, and agency DOGE Team Leads. As an entity created by Executive Order, USDS has no other independent sources of legal authority. [emphasis and links added]

There’s a lot that’s interesting about this — not least that she described the DOGE agenda consisted of four EOs but she cites five.

So much for government efficiency.

My guess is EO 14,218, which assigns DOGE the role of hunting down payments that go to undocumented people, was added as an afterthought. The EO does provide DOGE a role, but (unlike most of the others) does not address DOGE in the title.

What I’m particularly interested in, though, is that Gleason does not include EO 14,217, Commencing the Reduction of teh Federal Bureaucracy, the February 19 EO that ordered Institute for Peace, among other entities, to be shut down.

That’s not surprising. DOGE isn’t mentioned in the EO at all.

But that’s interesting because, according to USIP’s complaint, at a time when George Moose was still unquestionably President of the Institute for Peace, starting the day after the EO on February 20, DOGE representatives started nagging Moose about shutting down. First, Chris Young reached out. Then Moose met with DOGE representatives as President of USIP. Then Moose sent a letter to OMB, consistent with instructions in the EO. Then DOGE started conducting reconnaissance in advance of shutting USIP down.

39. On February 20, 2025, the day after the Executive Order was issued, Chris Young, a representative of the U.S. DOGE Service, contacted the Institute.

40. The Institute agreed to hold a virtual meeting with DOGE representatives on February 24, 2025. Ex. A, Declaration of George Moose; Ex. D, Declaration of George Foote.

41. In that February 24 meeting, the Institute president, Mr. Moose, and outside counsel for the Institute, George Foote, explained to DOGE representatives Cavanaugh, Burnham, and Altik that the Institute is an independent nonprofit corporation outside of the Executive branch. ; Ex. A, Declaration of George Moose; Ex. D, Declaration of George Foote.

42. On March 5, 2025, the Institute submitted a courtesy letter to OMB responding to the requests made in the Executive Order. The letter explained the Institute’s establishment by Congress and its status as an independent nonprofit that is not an Executive branch entity and reiterated the Institute’s willingness to maintain its longstanding cooperation with the Executive branch with regard to the foreign policy agenda of the President of the United States. Ex. D [sic], OMB Letter.

---

43. On or about March 8, 2025, Mr. Moose received word that DOGE was making inquiries into the status of the Institute’s security operations. These inquiries were intended to facilitate DOGE’s access to the Institute’s headquarters, just as DOGE had done with respect to numerous executive agencies. Ex. A, Declaration of George Moose.

44. On or about March 9, 2025, USIP outside counsel George Foote emailed Defendants Burnham, Altik, and Cavanaugh with information about the non-federal nature of the Institute’s security and the Institute’s ownership of its headquarters building. Mr. Foote again confirmed that the Institute is an independent nonprofit corporation and stated that unauthorized personnel would only be admitted with a valid warrant issued by a court. Ex. D., Declaration of George Foote. [emphasis, line, and links added]

It wasn’t until March 14 that the White House purported to fire all the board members so they could replace Moose.

46. On or about March 14, 2025, Trent Morse of the White House Presidential Personnel Office emailed certain members of the Board, including the Board Member Plaintiffs, claiming to inform them of their termination from the Board by President Trump. Those emails did not state any justification for the purported terminations. See Ex. D, Declaration of George Moose.

47. Shortly thereafter, on March 14, 2025, representatives from DOGE and Defendant Jackson appeared at USIP headquarters building requesting access. Because the Institute has administrative jurisdiction over the parcel of land on which its headquarters sits and the USIP building is owned by the Institute, those representatives were denied entry.

48. Later that same evening, Defendants Altik and Cavanaugh returned to the Institute’s headquarters accompanied by FBI Special Agents and presented Mr. Foote with a “resolution” signed by the three ex officio members of the Board purporting to remove Mr. Moose from his position as President of the Institute. Ex. F, Ex Officio Resolution. [emphasis and link added]

There’s nothing in the four — er, five — EOs that Gleason cites that authorizes DOGE to start shutting down agencies (and to the extent it calls for firing people at agencies, it puts agency heads in charge of that). And there’s nothing in the USIP- specific one that authorizes anyone outside the head of the affected entities — so, Moose, until March 14 if you believe he was lawfully fired — to do anything other than receive a report (as Russ Vought did on March 5) and discuss budgets with the head of the entity.

That means the actions DOGE took before Vought received the letter (marked with a line) — and probably the ones that happened at least until Trump claims to have replaced Moose — were not authorized under the scheme Gleason lays out.

She says that every DOGE team member at an agency reports to the agency head.

Every member of an agency’s DOGE Team is an employee of the agency or a detailee to the agency. The DOGE Team members – whether employees of the agency or detailed to the agency – thus report to the agency heads or their designees, not to me or anyone else at USDS.

So even if DOGE wants to claim that James Burnham and Jacob Altik and Nate Cavanaugh (all named defendants in the complaint) were reporting to a different agency — probably OMB, though ProPublica says they’re all lawyers locataed in the Executive Office of the Presidency — the EO shutting USIP down doesn’t even envision OMB to be involved before receiving that March 5 letter. After that, it only envisions OMB discussing budgets with the entity head. It would seem the things DOGE did before that were definitely unauthorized (and in any case not covered under the DOGE agenda), and most of the rest were too.

Judge Beryl Howell rejected USIP’s request for a Temporary Restraining Order yesterday in part because it has enough trappings of a federal entity to come under the recent DC Circuit Court opinion upholding Hampton Dellinger’s firing, and in part because the harms alleged in the complaint are contingent on the takeover being ruled unlawful. (Howell’s logic is quite similar to Richard Leon’s in the analogous US Africa Development Foundation lawsuit.)

Upon further consideration, the Institute may be deemed to sit outside of the executive branch, or the removal protections may be deemed appropriately enforceable within the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, but plaintiffs did not demonstrate as much in this expedited posture. See generally, Pls.’ Mot. (not addressing Myers or Humphrey’s Executor).Plaintiffs also did not demonstrate irreparable harm because their alleged harm was dependent on their success on the merits. Plaintiffs cited as their irreparable harm their inability to carry out their statutory functions and the harm to the Institute based on defendants’ intent to reduce it to the “statutory minimums” and defendants’ alleged destruction of the Institute’s property. Compl. 1 ¶¶ 59-65. Those harms, however, are dependent on plaintiffs’ success on the merits. Plaintiffs’ counsel can only represent the Institute–and thus properly assert the harms of the Institute–to the extent that plaintiff Board members and former President of the Institute, George Moose, were wrongfully removed. Plaintiffs likewise only suffer harm in their official capacities–the capacities in which they pled, Compl. ¶¶ 7-11–if they must lawfully remain members of the Board.

This may have been an invitation from Howell for plaintiffs to craft their complaint better.

And I don’t understand why they didn’t include an Appointments Clause in their complaint. Because people who were presenting as DOGE took steps to start dismantling the Institute, in defiance of Congress’ apparent intent, while Moose remained in charge.

USIP is not the only instance where DOGE took action that appears not to be covered by these four — er, five — EOs. In DOGE’s assault on the US African Development Foundation (which Trump targeted under the same EO), some of the same characters started invading under false pretenses before its head, Ward Brehm, was allegedly replaced on February 24.

4. On February 21, Ethan Shaotran, Jacob Altik, and Nate Cavanaugh arrived at USADF. Shaotran and Cavanaugh introduced themselves as IT personnel from GSA. Altik stated that he was a lawyer from the White House Personnel Office. They explained that we needed to immediately sign a memorandum of understanding for their detail assignment.

5. Once the MOU was signed, Altik explained the true purpose of the meeting, which was to provide USADF leadership with DOGE’s interpretation of the “minimum presence and function” required by USADF’s statute. DOGE read the statute to mean: 1) only the USADF Board and President/CEO are statutorily required, 2) only one or two grants funded by private sector partnerships are required, and 3) all other personnel/employees therefore needed to be eliminated under the Executive Order.

6. Altik stated that his next step was to present a RIF plan (where all USADF staff would be fired) to the board for approval by Monday, February 24. Altik threatened that if the Board didn’t approve the plan, the Board would be dismissed. Both Mathieu Zahui and I tried to explain to Altik that the President’s Executive Order gave the agency 14 days to respond and that we intended to comply with the order.

7. Cavanaugh and Altik then demanded immediate access to USADF systems including financial records and payment and human resources systems, which include staff job descriptions, personnel files, salaries, and organizational structure.

8. Mathieu Zahui outlined the administrative process—which includes security clearances—required to access sensitive data and personally identifiable information from the Agency’s systems. He provided forms for the software engineers to complete to begin background checks.

9. Cavanaugh requested waivers on the clearance process from the USADF board. Altik demanded contact information for all board members and further stated that if the Board was unable to provide immediate clearance to access USADF systems, that he would issue a notice of dismissal to all board members the same day.

[snip]

12. That same day, February 21, after learning that the DOGE team had secured the memorandum of understanding under false pretenses—stating that they would modernize our computer systems but then attempting to shut down USADF— our General Counsel withdrew the MOU.

13. On February 24, Ward Brehm informed USADF that he had received an email from Trent Morse notifying Brehm that he had been dismissed as a board member of USADF. The email was very brief and did not specify any reasons for the dismissal.

There are other instances, though these two are notable because representatives of DOGE started dismantling two entities before they were decapitated, meaning they couldn’t have been reporting to the entities themselves.

Admittedly, Amy Gleason’s declarations are meant to serve the limited purpose of evading FOIA. As I’ve discussed, her declarations conflict with another document sworn by her claiming to be detailed to HHS. Judges are actively scoffing at these conflicts, so it’s not like we should trust her CREW declarations either.

But until they declare Gleason’s latest to be inoperative, they would seem to lock the government into a statutory arrangement in other cases.

One of the lawsuits in which it was recently disclosed that DOGE boy Marko Elez emailed information with Personally Identifiable Information to two people at GSA (which I also wrote about here) is one in which Public Citizen is representing AARP in a Privacy Act claim against Treasury. [docket]

The government provided it in that case amid a discovery dispute, mostly as a courtesy because they were filing it in New York. But it contributed to a request for more information about what the hell Marko Elez was up to.

On February 18, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the government to file any Administrative Record behind the decision to give DOGE access to Treasury. The government squawked about that order, but after plaintiffs noted that the real decision maker in this case was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, not the people who had submitted declarations, Judge Kollar-Kotelly ordered those submitted, which the government provided — as a 215 page exhibit — on March 10.

On March 14 — the same day Treasury disclosed Elez’ mailed files to GSA — they supplemented that record. Some of the new documents appear to include some of the details Treasury gathered as they tried to figure out what Elez had done with his access.

That includes this data, showing that when someone first tried to give Elez access to the Top Secret Treasury Mainframe, they equivocated about whether to give Elez read only (the message on January 30) or read-write (the message the next day); at the time he appears to have been granted interim Secret, not Top Secret, clearance.

The main exhibit in the Administrative Record includes a spreadsheet showing what access he was supposed to have as of February 1, reflecting the sandboxed access described in earlier filings. It doesn’t reflect this read-write access.

Plaintiffs are also interested in Elez’ access during a late January trip to Kansas City, which has never been addressed in the declarations in this case.

What plaintiffs didn’t ask about (though they do ask for backup) is the letter sent on February 5 asking Elez to please sign the rules that go along with the Fiscal Service laptop Elez used to access Treasury networks.

Those rules include the following:

• Use Fiscal Service data, equipment, and IT systems properly and follow laws, regulations, and policies governing the use of such resources (Base Line Security Requirements, (BLSRs), Treasury Information Technology Security Program (TD-P 85-01), the Treasury Security Manual (TD-P 15-71), and Fiscal Service Policies).
• Protect Fiscal Service data, equipment and IT systems from loss, theft, damage, and unauthorized use or disclosure. Secure mobile media (paper and digital) based on the sensitivity of the information contained.
• Use appropriate sensitivity markings on mobile media (paper and digital).
• Promptly report any known or suspected security breaches or threats, including lost, stolen, or improper/suspicious use of Fiscal Service data, equipment, IT systems, or facilities to the IT Service Desk at 304-480-7777.
• Do not attempt to circumvent any security or privacy controls.
• Logoff, lock, or secure workstation/laptop to prevent unauthorized access to Fiscal Service IT systems or services.
• Do not read, alter, insert, copy, or delete any Fiscal Service data except in accordance with assigned job responsibilities, guidance, policies, or regulations. The ability to access data does not equate to the authority to access data. In particular, Users must not browse or search Fiscal Service data except in the performance of authorized duties.
• Do not reveal any data processed or stored by Fiscal Service except as required by job responsibilities and within established procedures.
• Do not remotely access Fiscal Service IT systems unless authorized to do so, such as an approved telework agreement authorizing remote access over the bureau’s VPN software.
• Do not transport or use Fiscal Service data or equipment outside of the United States or US Territories without written approval from the CSO or CISO.
• Do not connect Fiscal Service equipment to or access a Fiscal Service IT system from a foreign network without written approval from the CSO or CISO.
• Do not install or use unauthorized software or cloud services on Fiscal Service equipment.
• Take reasonable precautions to prevent unauthorized individuals from viewing screen contents or printed documents.
• Do not open e-mail attachments, or click links, from unknown or suspicious sources.
• Be responsible for all activities associated with your assigned user IDs, passwords, access tokens, identification badges, Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards, or other official identification device or method used to gain access to Fiscal Service data, equipment, IT systems, or facilities.
• Protect passwords and other access credentials from improper disclosure. Do not share passwords with anyone else or use another person’s password or other access credential such as, but not limited to, someone else’s PIV card.
• Use only equipment and software provided by Fiscal Service or that has been approved for use by Fiscal Service’s CIO or designee to conduct Fiscal Service business.
• Provide non-work contact information to the bureau to facilitate emergency communications.
• Comply with Fiscal Service social media policy, including restrictions on publishing Fiscal Service information to social media and public websites. [my emphasis]

One of these rules, about not revealing data processed by Fiscal Service, would seem to apply to his sharing of information with GSA.

There’s no evidence Elez ever did sign those rules. Instead, he quit — and, without evidence, the entire world has assumed he quit because he was revealed to have made racist comments on social media.

It’s not yet clear what happened; perhaps it’ll become more clear if plaintiffs get discovery. But by all appearances, on Scott Bessent’s authority, someone at least considered giving a guy only cleared to the Secret level Read/Write access to Treasury’s Top Secret Mainframe, without first making sure he had signed a list of rules about altering or copying data.

And then he left.

Update: I’ve tweaked this reflecting the comment below that the Mainframe may be called Top Secret, without actually being classified Top Secret.

Update: Judge Kollar-Kotelly did grant more limited discovery. That includes most, but not all, details plaintiffs wanted about Elez’ email:

9. With respect to the email sent by Marko Elez referred to in paragraph 12 of the declaration of David Ambrose, ECF 48-2:

a. identify each addressee, including any cc’s or bcc’s.

b. state the date on which the email was sent.

c. identify each individual, if any, who authorized or directed Mr. Elez to send the email.

d. identify the Bureau Systems from which the Personal Information contained in the email or the attached spreadsheet was obtained.

[removed]

f. describe the nature of the information that was transmitted, including whether the information relates to the USAID files that Mr. Elez copied, as noted in paragraph 18 of Joseph Gioeli’s declaration, ECF 24-2.

I want to elaborate on the shenanigans pertaining to purported DOGE Administrator Amy Gleason here. (Thanks to LOLGOP for helping me make a video to help explain it.)

For some time, I’ve been talking about the way that DOGE, because it is so bureaucratically incompetent and because it is led by someone easy to villainize, actually provides regime opponents with an auspicious tool we otherwise wouldn’t have had if Trump had implemented his Project 2025 agenda more slowly via Russ Vought’s expert work.

If done competently, existing Article II authority and SCOTUS’ enthusiasm to expand it may well have provided a way to do everything they’re currently doing with complete legal sanction. But they chose not to do it competently, which has provided some means to at least slow things down and possibly to get SCOTUS to overturn this.

To be sure, the damage Elon Musk is doing on the front end is catastrophic. Elon is destroying lives and competencies with his chainsaw.

But because of DOGE’s incompetence, it creates legal leverage that I’m fairly confident Vought could have managed to avoid.

Agent Elon Musk

It has to do with Elon’s agency.

There have been a number of stories on how Elon came to choose USDS as a vehicle for his project — whatever purpose that project has. NPR did an early story on the background of the US Digital Service. Wired did a story on what that takeover looked like from inside. Wired did a more comprehensive piece this week.

There were several important bureaucratic reasons to use USDS as a vehicle for DOGE. By repurposing an already-existing entity, Trump avoided disclosure requirements under Federal Advisory Committee Act; this served to defeat the already-written lawsuits filed the first week of the Administration. And because USDS was a White House agency, it might have protected DOGE from other kinds of transparency, notably FOIA. And keeping it in the White House hypothetically made DOGE an advisory entity firmly under Article II power, not subject to other legal challenges.

It was a brilliant bureaucratic theory.

And then Elon and Trump and Karoline Leavitt kept opening their big mouths, making boastful claims about Elon’s own agency — double entendre intended — in the destruction that undermined the entire bureaucratic logic. For example, Elon’s claim to have put USAID through the wood chipper makes virtually every court filing.

By claiming credit for destroying free-standing agencies, Elon has undermined the entire premise of using USDS as a vehicle, because it has boasted that Elon has more power than USDS is supposed to have. As a result, Trump had to attempt to retcon the reporting structure of DOGE, in an attempt to sustain the bureaucratic benefits of using USDS as a vehicle.

In recent weeks, the intersection of several different lawsuits and several different legal theories opened a significant chink in the entire bureaucratic game.

It has to do with Elon’s agency. If DOGE is an agency and Elon heads it, then many of the bureaucratic benefits arising from using USDS as a vehicle collapse. Plaintiffs will get visibility into DOGE. And they’re likely to make Appointments Clause complaints that SCOTUS is generally amenable to.

OMB accepts a FOIA

One early mistake DOGE made was to accept a FOIA from CREW and grant it expedited processing, only to try to renege on that stance weeks later.

[O]n January 24, 2025, CREW submitted an expedited FOIA request to OMB (“Second OMB Request”) “seeking records related to changes to the operations of the U.S. Digital Service, organizational charts, financial disclosures, and other information relevant to the newly-formed USDS.” Id. ¶ 90; Mot. for PI, Ex. C (copy of Second OMB Request). The second request similarly focused on the time period beginning November 6, 2024, but also requested some records dating back until January 2014. Id. On the same day, CREW contacted the OMB FOIA Requester Service Center to ask how to submit a FOIA request directly to USDS and was directed to submit that request through OMB, too. Mot. for PI, Ex. D at 1 n.1. Accordingly, CREW also submitted an expedited FOIA request directly to USDS (“USDS Request”), which, along with the just-listed information, sought “[a]ll communications between USDS personnel and personnel of any federal agency outside of the Executive Office of the President.” Compl. ¶ 90; Mot. for PI, Ex. D. On January 24, OMB acknowledged receipt of both requests. Id. ¶ 92.

[snip]

Although OMB initially agreed to process the USDS request and granted it expedited treatment, it has since done an about face. After CREW sued, the government suggested that OMB had inadvertently accepted the USDS request. See Opp’n at 8–9 n.2. It further indicated that USDS had been reorganized as a “free-standing component of EOP that reports to the White House Chief of Staff.” Id. “As a result,” the government posits, “USDS is not subject to FOIA.” Id. The government confirmed at oral argument on CREW’s motion that neither OMB nor USDS itself intend to process the USDS request on that ground. Rough Tr. 3:23–4:4.

Normally, the White House, but not OMB, is immune from FOIA. OMB is not immune because it is a separate agency. Because OMB accepted this FOIA it provided CREW a way, within the FOIA context, to argue that DOGE was an agency.

That fuckup is what led Judge Christopher Cooper to grant a limited expedited FOIA response to CREW on March 10.

The narrowed USDS request seeks, in each case from January 20, 2025, to the present: “all memoranda, directives, or policies regarding changes to the operations of USDS”; organizational charts for USDS; ethics pledges, waivers and financial disclosures of USDS personnel; “all communications with the office of the Administrator of the USDS regarding actual or potential changes to USDS operations”; and “all communications between USDS personnel and personnel of any federal agency outside of the Executive Office of the President regarding that agency’s staffing levels (including any effort to reduce staffing), treatment of probationary employees, contract and grant administration, access to agency information technology systems, or the authority of USDS in relation to that agency.”

In granting that limited response, Cooper noted that DOGE never disputed claims that Elon was exercising significant authority.

The Court recognizes that much, though by no means all, of the evidence supporting its preliminary conclusion that USDS is wielding substantial independent authority derives from media reports. Yet, the Court finds it meaningful that in its briefing and at oral argument, USDS has not contested any of the factual allegations suggesting its substantial independent authority. To be sure, USDS claims it declined to make this argument because CREW’s “motion fails for multiple independent reasons.”

That led DOGE to ask for reconsideration of the FOIA order, which CREW calls “a do-over,” attempting to make the arguments about agency that — Cooper noted explicitly — it had declined to make in its first response. Along with that motion, DOGE submitted a declaration from Amy Gleason on March 14 making claims about DOGE’s structure that directly conflict with claims, including sworn claims made by Gleason, made about DOGE elsewhere.

1. My name is Amy Gleason. The following is based on my personal knowledge or information provided to me in the course of performing my duties at the United States DOGE Service (USDS).

2. I currently serve as the Acting Administrator of USDS. I joined USDS on December 30, 2024.

3. I am a full-time, government employee at USDS.

4. In my role at USDS, I oversee all of USDS’s employees and detailees to USDS from other agencies. 5. I report to the White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles.

6. Elon Musk does not work at USDS. I do not report to him, and he does not report to me. To my knowledge, he is a Senior Advisor to the White House.

Now, the government strongly implies that it wants Judge Cooper to rule quickly on its motion for summary judgment so it can appeal right away. Maybe that will all happen.

But it doesn’t put Gleason’s materially conflict declarations back in the box.

Elon’s conflicts become an issue

Meanwhile, as soon as DOGE came after the Department of Labor, a bunch of labor unions sued under what would normally be a weak privacy challenge, but to which both their initial and amended filings included the concern that DOGE generally and Elon specifically could access data of interest to Elon’s business or his companies, including data about labor complaints targeting his businesses.

9. DOGE will also have access to Department of Labor records concerning investigations of Mr. Musk’s businesses, as well as records containing the sensitive trade secrets of his business competitors, which are held by the Department of Labor and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. No other business owner on the planet has access to this kind of information on his competitors, and for good reason.

[snip]

30. Defendant U.S. DOGE Service (“USDS”) is a federal entity situated within the Executive Office of the President in Washington, D.C. Upon information and belief, its work is directed by Elon Musk, who is reportedly serving in the Trump-Vance Administration as a Special Government Employee (“SGE”). Mr. Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of over $400 billion. Concurrent with his tenure in government, Mr. Musk has numerous large business concerns, many of which have substantial ties to the federal government and U.S. politics. They include SpaceX, a space technology company and extensive federal government contractor; Tesla Motors, an electric vehicle company; Neuralink, a neurotechnology startup seeking to embed computer hardware into the human brain; the Boring Company, a tunnel construction company; and X, formerly known as Twitter, a large social media platform.

[snip]

75. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (“OSHA”) within the Department is responsible for enforcing safety standards at American companies. OSHA has investigated Mr. Musk’s space technology company, SpaceX, over multiple safety incidents, and has fined SpaceX in connection with one worker’s death and seven other serious safety incidents.33

76. OSHA has also investigated and issued fines to Tesla for unsafe working conditions in its factories. 34

77. OSHA also has open investigations into the Boring Company, and has issued it multiple fines for serious citations, according to OSHA’s website.35

78. On information and belief, the Department of Labor also currently has open investigations into one or more competitors of Mr. Musk’s companies.

79. Mr. Musk would ordinarily be unable to access non-public information regarding those investigations. See 18 U.S.C. § 1832(a) (Trade Secrets Act); 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(4) (FOIA exemption for trade secrets); 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7) (FOIA exemption for records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes).

80. In light of the blanket instruction to provide DOGE employees with “anything they want,” Mr. Musk or his associates will be able to access that information simply by asking DOL employees for it.

[snip]

156. There is no public indication that Mr. Musk or DOGE personnel on leave from Mr. Musk’s corporate interests will be recused from access to any of this data, which includes “hundreds of complaints about [Mr. Musk’s] electric car company Tesla.”91

The judge in this case, John Bates, twice rejected their bid for a Temporary Restraining Order on standing grounds. But in plaintiffs’ second bid for one, they argued that DOGE members were prohibited from accessing agency records at Department of Labor, HHS, and CFPB under terms permitted by the Privacy Act because they didn’t work for an agency.

With respect to inter-agency personnel agreements, Congress provided legal authority for exactly that purpose through the Economy Act of 1932, which regulates whether and when federal employees can be temporarily detailed to new agencies. The Economy Act provides that, under certain circumstances, “[t]he head of an agency or major organizational unit within an agency may place an order with a major organizational unit within the same agency or another agency for goods or services[.]” 31 U.S.C. § 1535(a) (emphasis added). For purposes of Title 15 of the U.S. Code, “‘agency’ means a department, agency, or instrumentality of the United States Government.” Id. § 101. Because DOGE is not an “agency or a major organizational unit within an agency” for purposes of the Economy Act, it cannot lawfully enter into agreements to detail its personnel to lawfully established federal agencies.

Bates still denied their TRO. But in his second order rejecting their privacy claims, he relied on defendants’ representations about whether they were an agency or not (they argued they were an instrumentality). They only successfully defeated a TRO request because, Bates opined, they were an agency.

Under those definitions, USDS—which is located with the Executive Office of the President, see First DOGE E.O. § 3(a)—appears to be an agency. In each context mentioned above, an entity within the Executive Office of the President is an agency if it “wield[s] substantial authority independently of the President.” Elec. Priv. Info. Ctr. v. Presidential Advisory Comm’n on Election Integrity, 266 F. Supp. 3d 297, 315 (D.D.C. 2017). If instead it serves solely “to advise and assist the President,” it is not an agency. Alexander v. FBI, 456 F. App’x 1, 1–2 (D.C. Cir. 2011) (quoting Kissinger v. Reporters Comm., 445 U.S. 136, 156 (1980)). As plaintiffs themselves insist, USDS appears to do much more than advise and assist the President. USDS’s mission, per the Executive Order, is to “implement” the President’s modernization agenda, not simply to help him form it. See First DOGE E.O. § 1. While the record isn’t crystal clear as to these allegations, it is apparent that USDS is coordinating teams across multiple agencies with the goal of reworking and reconfiguring agency data, technology, and spending. See supra n.3 (describing the duties of the DOGE team members at DOL, HHS, and CFPB; Exec. Order No. 14,210, 90 Fed. Reg. 9669 (Feb. 11, 2025) § 3 (“Second DOGE E.O.”) (ordering that agency heads collaborate with DOGE teams on new appointment hires and prohibiting agencies from “fill[ing] any vacancies for career appointments that the DOGE Team Lead assesses should not be filled”). That is not the stuff of mere advice and assistance. See, e.g., Sweetland v. Walters, 60 F.3d 852, 854 (D.C. Cir. 1995).

Curiously, defendants do not make this argument. They shy away from other, similar statutory definitions of agencies, notwithstanding USDS’s strong claim to agency status under them. This appears to come from a desire to escape the obligations that accompany agencyhood— subjection to FOIA, the Privacy Act, the APA, and the like—while reaping only its benefits. Indeed, at the renewed TRO hearing, defendants’ counsel insisted that USDS is not an agency under any of those three statutes (not to mention two Executive Orders scaffolding USDS, see First DOGE E.O. § 2(a); Second DOGE E.O. § 2(a)), but is under the Economy Act. Defendants insist that the inclusion of “instrumentalities” in the Economy Act definition renders “agency” there broader than its sibling definitions of “agency.” And so USDS becomes, on defendants’ view, a Goldilocks entity: not an agency when it is burdensome but an agency when it is convenient.

Plaintiffs leaned into this language when they requested discovery.

Plaintiffs argued that DOGE is not an “agency” for the purposes of the Economy Act, that it exists purely to advise the President and does not possess and organic statutory authority that would permit it to enter into Economy Act agreements with Defendant agencies. ECF No. 29-1 at 34-37. Defendants argue that DOGE is not an “agency,” but does constitute an “instrumentality” that may permissibly enter into Economy Act agreements. See Transcript of TRO Motion Hearing, ECF No. 41 at 32. This Court concluded that, based on the information before the Court about DOGE’s functional activities, DOGE most resembles an agency, but expressly noted the limitations of the current record and briefing to date.

[snip]

The facts about how DOGE is structured are arguably become less clear with time. On February 17, 2025, the White House stated for the first time that Elon Musk is not an employee of DOGE nor is he the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator.

[snip]

Discovery about the functional structure of DOGE–including who has decision-making authority over it–is directly relevant to being able to evaluate its status as an agency or instrumentality to whom Plaintiffs’ sensitive data may be disclosed without causing injury.

That’s part of what led Judge Bates to grant discovery. Another was that defendants’ own claims conflicted with the record.

Plaintiffs seek discovery on these issues in part because defendants already put into the record some facts relevant to the issues. The declarations defendants filed with their oppositions to plaintiffs’ TRO motions—all of which were prepared well after the challenged agency actions—introduced before-unknown information—some of which conflicted—on how USDS is operating at the defendant agencies: from the number of USDS employees working at each defendant agency, to the training and agreements put in place for those employees, to the access those employees are given.

[snip]

It would be strange to permit defendants to submit evidence that addresses critical factual issues and proceed to rule on a preliminary injunction motion without permitting plaintiffs to explore those factual issues through very limited discovery.

And that’s what led DOGE to take a rash step: To make the woman they had just declared to be their DOGE Administrator an HHS employee, effective March 4, even while they disclaiming being an agency in the CREW suit, and asking Amy Gleason to submit a sworn declaration claiming to be a full time DOGE employee ten days later.

Amy Gleason is on the hook for sworn claims to be an employee of HHS and, at the same time, to be DOGE’s full-time Administrator.

Elon skipped his appointment with Congress

All that this shell game over agency status has gotten plaintiffs so far — if the government can’t reverse these decisions on appeal — is some visibility about what DOGE really is, including visibility about what it’s doing with union members’ data.

But it’s all boxing the government in on what does matter: The at-least three different challenges to DOGE that argue Elon’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause, something that could — and did yesterday, in the Does 1-26 v. Elon lawsuit — require reversing all the actions the government has taken under Elon’s watch.

Does 1-26

New Mexico

Japanse American Citizens

It’s that lawsuit, Does 1-26 v Musk, in which Judge Theodore Chuang made big news yesterday by enjoining Elon and requiring the government to start reversing the effects of what DOGE did. But the lawsuit, and so his order, only apply to Elon and DOGE. Plus, to the extent that Elon can get permission from Marco Rubio or Pete Marocco to do the very same things they’ve already done, they have two weeks under the order to do that.

It’s an important ruling, but the most likely effect it may have, in practice, is to reveal how much DOGE broke when it was dismantling USAID, which may soon become evident to people getting their digital access restored.

In making his ruling, Chuang relied exclusively on the public record, all the instances of Trump hailing Elon for his DOGE work and Elon’s own claims about woodchippers.

In another of these cases, though, one by Democratic Attorneys General (captioned as New Mexico), Judge Tanya Chutkan granted plaintiffs expedited discovery on March 12, meaning barring a successful appeal, the AGs will get more visibility on DOGE by April 2 or thereabouts.

Still, like the Does 1-26 case, the AGs lawsuit only targets Elon (and Trump). It won’t have the ability of rolling back everything DOGE did. It might make DOGE itself illegal barring Congressional action, but it cannot reverse everything.

The third suit, which also names the agencies themselves, might do that.

Update: Judge Bates has denied the government’s motion to reconsider his discovery order and has instead extended it as plaintiffs requested. The order … shows some impatience with DOGE’s changing claims.

Presumption of irregularity

None of that is going to happen quickly.

But what is happening quickly is that the conflicting claims before different judges are making it clear that nothing this Administration says can be trusted.

CREW

[docket]

Judge Christopher Cooper

This is a simple FOIA lawsuit.

AFL-CIO

[docket]

Judge John Bates

This is primarily a privacy lawsuit, strengthen by unions’ need to be able to make confidential reports to Department of Labor.

Does 1-26 v. Musk

[docket]

Judge Theodore Chuang

This Appointments Clause challenge only sues Musk, not other government agencies.

New Mexico v. Musk

[docket]

Judge Tanya Chutkan

This Appointments Clause challenge sues Musk and Trump, but not agencies.

Japanese American Citizens

[docket]

Judge Tanya Chutkan

This is the most advanced Appointments Clause challenge, but may be consolidated with New Mexico. It not only sues Musk, but also a long list of agencies.

Back on February 27, longtime squish Judge John Bates granted plaintiffs in an AFL-CIO lawsuit about DOGE data sharing discovery, the first such grant of discovery in DOGE cases. I was … surprised.

On March 11, defendant agencies asked Bates to reconsider based on their attempt to retcon the facts to eliminate the entire point of discovery (see this post for the many ways Trump keeps attempting to retcon things). In effect, they tried to eliminate the injury of having DOGE personnel working across multiple agencies, giving them access to multiple kinds of data, by hiring people at the affected agencies (HHS, CFPB and Department of Labor) into those agencies.

The factual basis for this change in status is set forth in the declarations attached to this motion, as well as the documents Defendants have moved to lodge under seal with the Court. In total, three individuals—two at HHS, and one at CFPB—were previously working at these agencies through a detail from USDS to the agency; all are now direct employees of the agency, in addition to being employees of USDS. See Rice Decl. ¶¶ 8–10; Martinez Decl. ¶4. Although it initially intended to bring on USDS employees as detailees, DOL stopped this process shortly after this lawsuit was filed, and did not subsequently onboard any USDS employees as detailees.3 Kryger Decl. ¶ 6. Today, all employees working to implement the DOGE E.O. at the Agency Defendants are now direct employees of the agencies at which they work, or detailees from agencies that no one disputes fall within the definition of “agency” under the Economy Act.

Defendants subsequently provided Plaintiffs with additional information about the employment arrangements of former USDS detailees. Specifically, on Friday, March 7, Defendants provided Plaintiffs with the SF-61s, or oath of office, for each former USDS detailee, which establishes their relationship as a direct employee of the relevant agency. On Monday, March 10, 2025, Defendants provided unredacted versions of these agreements to Plaintiffs so they could evaluate Defendants’ request to lodge the materials under seal.

Plaintiffs’ March 13 response is a dizzying description, drawing on declarations submitted in a bunch of other lawsuits, of all the ways DOGE is sharing across agencies, and all the past claims about DOGE that have fallen to pieces.

As part of the latter argument, plaintiffs invoked the way Trump retconned Amy Gleason to be DOGE administrator.

In this case and others, the government has refused to provide consistent, accurate, and plausible recitations of basic facts related to DOGE’s operations.

In this case, for example, Defendants identified five DOGE employees at Defendant Agencies in declarations prior to TRO hearings. Ramada Decl., ECF No. 16-1 ¶ 5 (identifying three DOGE detailees to DOL); Rice Decl., ECF No. 31-2 ¶ 5 (identifying one DOGE detailee to HHS); Martinez Decl., ECF No. 31-3 ¶ 5 (identifying one DOGE detailee to CFPB). Shortly thereafter, Defendants characterized the number of DOGE employees at the agencies as “untold.” ECF No. 45 at 16.

Now, Defendants claim that only two DOGE employees work at HHS, but, as described above, that claim is inconsistent with the agency’s own public database of employees. And, as described above, Mr. Martinez’s declaration concerning the processes governing DOGE access at CFPB conflicts with sworn testimony from current and former CFPB employees.

Indeed, Mr. Martinez publicly testified earlier this week that he has previously made sworn representations in publicly-filed declarations that he now knows are incorrect. According to Mr. Martinez, these false representations occurred because he did not actually “know about the mission side of the agency” and simply conveyed in his declarations “what they [agency leadership] told [him].” Exhibit G at 184-88.

In another case, the government represented that a DOGE employee would have only “read-only” access to sensitive systems at the Department of Treasury, only to correct themselves later that the employee had in fact previously been granted more expansive access to those systems. Compare Defs. Memo of Law in Support of Emergency Mot. To Dissolve, Clarify, or Modify Ex Parte Temporary Restraining Order, State of N.Y. v. U.S. Dep’t of Treas., No. 25 Civ. 01144, ECF No. 12 at 6 n. 2 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 9, 2025) (“Marco Elez [] had ‘read only’ access to . . . BFS payment systems.”), and Declaration of Joseph Gioeli III, id., ECF No. 34 at ¶ 20 (the Department discovered on February 6 that “Mr. Elez’s database access . . . had mistakenly been configured with read/write permissions instead of read-only”)

With regards to the leadership and structure of DOGE, the government’s positions continue to be ephemeral. As detailed in the February 18 status report in this case, ECF No. 42 at 2-3, and in Plaintiffs’ February 26 Reply Brief in Support of Expedited Discovery, ECF No. 46 at 9 n. 10, the executive branch has taken multiple conflicting positions on the structure of DOGE’s leadership. The executive for the first time stated that Mr. Musk is not the USDS Administrator in a February 17 court filing, then on February 18 refused to identify the USDS Administrator, then on February 19 President Trump said Mr. Musk is in charge of DOGE, then on February 25 for the first time identified Amy Gleason as the USDS Administrator, while also saying that Mr. Musk is “overseeing DOGE.” See ECF No. 42 at 2-3, ECF No. 46 at 9 n.10. During a February 28 court hearing in another matter, a DOJ attorney was reportedly asked who the USDS Administrator was prior to Ms. Gleason, and responded that he had asked that question and “was not able to get [an] answer.” 9 On March 4, President Trump repeated during a joint address to Congress that Mr. Musk heads DOGE.10

In sum, Defendants’ new proffered employment arrangements do not diminish the need in this case for discovery into whether and how DOGE is accessing sensitive data systems at Defendant Agencies or how DOGE is actually structured and operates with respect to DOGE employees working at Defendant Agencies. [my emphasis]

Meanwhile, back on March 11, DOJ asked to submit the attachments to several declarations, including this one from HHS referencing anonymous employees affected by the revamped employment structure under seal. (Remember, DOJ had given these to plaintiffs; they were trying to keep them hidden from us.)

6. As stated in my prior declaration, at least one USDS employee was detailed to HHS in furtherance of the EO in early February 2025 (“HHS detailee”).

7. In addition, I have since learned that another USDS employee was detailed to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (“CMS”) in furtherance of the EO in the same February 2025 time frame (“CMS detailee”). This detailee was previously detailed from USDS to CMS from 2018 to March 2020 to work on CMS health data interoperability and modernizing technology.

8. Both of these individuals were converted to direct hires of HHS on March 4, 2025. True and correct copies of their SF-61 Appointment Affidavits are attached to this declaration as Attachment A. Both individuals also continue to be employees of USDS.

Yesterday, Judge Bates was like, “uh, no, you can’t seal these declarations; the DOGE affiliations of these people are already widely public.”

The information the SF-61s reveal that may lead to harassment—the three affiants’ identities and their work with DOGE—has already been widely publicized, undercutting the argument for sealing the documents. See In re L.A. Comms. LLC, 628 F. Supp. 3d 55, 66, 69 (D.D.C. 2022); Zapp v. Zhenli Ye Gon, 746 F. Supp. 2d 145, 149 (D.D.C. 2010). Defendants contend that reporting does not negate the affiants’ privacy interests because “[d]efendants have not publicly acknowledged the employment relationships at issue.” Mot. ¶ 10. However, defendants have publicly acknowledged all three affiants’ associations with DOGE,2 have publicly acknowledged Brad Smith’s work at HHS, see U.S. Dep’t of HHS, HHS Employee Details, https://directory.psc.gov/hhsdir/eeKey.asp?Key=66006&Format=Table (last accessed March 13, 2025) [https://perma.cc/JM7S-VSMT], and have put on the record in another case in this District emails Jordan Wick sent and received from a CFPB email address, see Email from Mark Paoletta to Jafnar Gueve (Feb. 11, 2025), NTEU v. Vought, Civ. A. No. 25-381 (ABJ), ECF No. 56-1 at 6; Email from Jordan Wick to Russell Vought (Feb. 20, 2025), NTEU, ECF No. 66-2 at 5. Finally, reports and records show the three affiants are not just DOGE employees, but senior DOGE members. See, e.g., supra, n.2; HHS Employee Details, supra.

That’s when Judge Bates revealed the identity of one of them was … Amy Gleason, the retconned DOGE Administrator.

In fact, the Trump Administration has acknowledged that Amy Gleason is the Acting Administrator of USDS. See Citizens for Resp. & Ethics in Wa. v. U.S. Doge Serv., Civ. A. No. 25-511 (CRC), 2025 WL 752367, at *2 (D.D.C. Mar. 10, 2025)

That’s how this filing became public.

Amy Gleason, purportedly in charge of all of DOGE since February 25, was instead snuck into HHS on March 4 as an employee to cover for her broad access to the PII of American citizens.

Update: As Kyle Cheney noted in his story on this, last week Amy Gleason filed an affidavit in a CREW lawsuit suing to FOIA DOGE.  She claimed to be full-time Administrator at DOGE and made no mention of her HHS appointment. She swore these claims were correct.

3. I am a full-time, government employee at USDS.

4. In my role at USDS, I oversee all of USDS’s employees and detailees to USDS from other agencies.

5. I report to the White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles.

These kinds of conflicting sworn statements are what happen when you keep retconning what you claim to be going on in an attempt to dodge one after another valid legal theory against your law-breaking. These kinds of conflicting sworn statements provide legal purchase where, had someone competent like Russ Voght done this slowly and deliberately from the start, there would have been none.

You’ve likely heard that Judge Theodore Chuang has enjoined DOGE in the context of its destruction of USAID.

Just as importantly, he has ruled that an Appointments Clause challenge to DOGE is likely to succeed. As I have repeatedly argued, such a challenge — arguing that to wield as much power as Elon Musk does, you have to be Senate confirmed in a position created by Congress — would be most likely to survive a SCOTUS review. (It’s the same basis Aileen Cannon used to throw out the Jack Smith case.)

To be sure, I’m a bit skeptical about the order and injunction. The latter only enjoins DOGE from doing anything on their own; if they get USAID approval, they can do whatever they want to do.

But the opinion notes that the Appointments ruling only applies to two things that, the record before the court shows, Elon did himself: shutting down USAID as an agency and shutting down the building. While the injunction requires USAID to stop any further terminations and let employees start accessing payment systems again, even though it notes that Gavin Kliger sent the email that terminated at least a few of the plaintiffs, those decisions involved Marco Rubio and Pete Marocco.

The opinion is most fun for the two extended sections where it dismisses the government’s claim that Elon is not in charge of DOGE.

Most notably, on February 19, 2025, President Trump publicly stated, “I signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency and put a man named Elon Musk in charge.” J.R. 568. Musk spoke on behalf of DOGE at a joint press conference with the President on February 11, in a joint interview with the President on February 18, and at the Cabinet meeting on February 26.

Musk’s public statements and posts on X, in which he has stated on multiple occasions that DOGE will take action, and such action occurred shortly thereafter, demonstrate that he has firm control over DOGE.

[snip]

Althought the White House announced on February 25, 2025, that Amy Gleason is now the Acting USDS Administrator, that same day, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt maintained that “the president tasked Elon Musk to oversee the DOGE effort” while noting that others “are helping to run DOGE on a day-to-day basis.” J.R. 616. Notably, at the February 28, 2025 hearing on this Motion, Defendants’ counsel could not identify, despite having made an inquiry, who the USDS Administrator was before Gleason.

We shall see how this survives appeal (the suit was filed in Maryland, so it’ll go through a different Circuit than most DOGE challenges, including the New Mexico one that is closest to this stage).

But for the moment, it has held that Elon has absolutely no authority to do most of what he has done.

One thing I’ve been attempting to track under Trump 2.0 are all the nice things Americans used to have that Trump has deliberately taken away. This is the running list, which will be a page (like my DOGE Debunking and lawsuit declaration pages) here.

I’m posting this now in super raw form for several reasons.

1. I’m missing a ton! Especially datasets that have been taken down (some of the stuff that was memory-holed appears in the main list). Let me know what I’m missing below.
2. I’m wondering how this will be most useful. Obviously, right now I’ve just been capturing links when I see stories. Are these links sufficient?
3. Steal my work! I’m hoping someone with more resources can do a better version of this. So if you want to steal this list and expand on it, feel free!

General EOs

Lower drug prices

Infrastructure

Free wind energy

Health and Science

NIH matching funds

Immunotherapy cancer cures

VA research

VA mental health

Kidney transplants

Insulin

Obesity drugs

Bird flu (rehired)

Flu shots

mRNA research

Cancer research

Diabetes research

Food banks

Disabilities protections

Telehealth and cheaper broadband

Protections for the disabled

Meals on wheels

USAID programs targeting polio, malaria, TB, HIV, and malnourishment

Indian Health Services (rehired)

CHIPS Act

Battery factories

Fentanyl disruption in Mexico

Agent Orange cleanup in Vietnam

Antarctica

Food inspections

Food safety

Gun violence warnings

Education

Teacher retention

Energy and Environmental

Grants for farmers in IRA

Renewable energy for farmers

Other farm grants

2.5 billion gallons of water

Halting EV plug-ins (including at government buildings)

Bonneville Power Service (rehired)

Dam safety

New oil drilling

Weather service

Weather forecasting stations

Volcano warnings

Keeping the Colorado River flowing

National Park Service (partly rehired, plus seasonal hires)

Michigan sea lamprey eradication

Prairie education

Food aid for schools

Environmental research

Financial

Investigations for rich tax cheats

Consumer protection from financial entities

Privacy protection from tech platforms

Easy tax returns

Taxpayer assistance

Experts on complex tax collection

Affordable housing

Security

National Security research

Terrorism research

FAA Litigation (tracking pilots who shouldn’t fly and flight schools who shoudn’t teach)

Union protections for TSA workers

Bird flu workers (attempted reversal)

NNSA (attempted reversal)

Justice

Corporate prosecutions

Integration

Complaints about tech companies

International

Finding kidnapped Ukrainian children

Human Rights reporting

Voice of America

Data

Libraries

Climate change

Air quality (internationally)

Personnel

Eight Inspectors General who found $183B in waste, fraud and abuse (from this complaint)

USAID economist Dean Karlan resigns

NIH principal deputy director Tabak resigns

NIH head Francis Collins resigns

Genome project lead Eric Green ousted

David Lebryk leaves Treasury

Doug O’Donnell leaves IRS

CATO engaged in an interesting project: faced with all the uncertainty about what DOGE is up to, it attempted to lay out six possible models to explain what DOGE is doing.

Social science models simplify reality, spotlighting key variables that may shape DOGE’s actions in a way that can be tested. The models discussed above clearly simplify the complex endeavor of reforming the largest human organization ever by expenditures—the U.S. federal government. They help explain past decisions and anticipate future moves. The models above try to make sense of DOGE’s actions so far. They are not mutually exclusive, yet several can be informative together or alone, while some may only make sense temporarily. Other models not set out here might offer fresh insights, but scholars should try to develop them. Without doing so, one of the biggest policy initiatives of President Trump’s second term risks being under-analyzed or misunderstood.

It offered these six possible models:

1. DOGE is seeking to purge progressive influence within the federal government.
2. DOGE is a scaled-up public version of Musk’s style of corporate restructuring applied to the federal government.
3. DOGE is the first step of a public relations campaign to build popular support for spending cuts.
4. DOGE is an essential component of a Trump administration legal challenge to expand the president’s power of impoundment.
5. DOGE provides political cover for Congress to be even more fiscally irresponsible.
6. DOGE is about self-interest and cronyism.

Some of these — like the attempt to purge progressivism and cronyism — are partially convincing. Others, such as the claim that DOGE helps either the PR campaign or the legal one, are soundly rebutted by public facts. DOGE’s epic failures have increased pushback and provided legal bases to challenge cutbacks that wouldn’t exist if done more competently.

Even when it considers the possibility that Elon is self-dealing, CATO’s exercise is wildly credulous about DOGE’s own — Elon’s own — deceit. This piece, which they link, is far less so:

Elon Musk has many great strengths, but he is not a reliable narrator.

[snip]

As has been well covered in mainstream outlets, DOGE has been extremely sloppy about cutting contracts and reporting the numbers. Most of the biggest ticket savings have been the result of DOGE misreading federal contracting data, or killing contracts that were already dead. From the New York Times:

What’s more concerning than the sloppiness itself is that it does not appear to be getting resolved over time. The same kinds of data parsing errors and confusion about how federal contracts are awarded and then paid out have persisted over two months. Some of this comes back to the information environment: DOGE has instituted few if any ground-up mechanisms within the federal government to surface real savings opportunities.

Both pieces seem to treat the evolving explanation about what DOGE is (which CATO lays out in more depth and I’ve laid out here) as an evolving goal; neither considers whether it is an evolving cover story, necessitated, in part, by the inaptness of the USDS mission to what DOGE wants to do, exposed via various lawsuits.

Importantly, both ignore the most troubling aspect of DOGE: Its repeated rush to access the live data from these agencies. That has happened over and over — at OPM, at the Social Security Agency, at HHS. As Tiffany Flick wrote in a widely reported declaration, these boys are being granted access for which they have no obvious need to know, and they’re accessing that data in insecure ways, to use in rooms remotely with other DOGE boys.

You don’t need to access the Personally Identifiable Information of all Americans to cut costs. You don’t need to access the PII of all Americans to harmonize benefit programs across agencies, in the process making it easier to identify fraud. You don’t need to access the PII of all Americans to cash in (unless using it for extortion). Doing so doesn’t help your PR case or your impoundment case.

It certainly could be part of a totalitarian bid for power, a way to identify undocumented immigrants who were advised to pay their taxes, same sex married couples, or trans people who have changed their gender on official documents.

And that application might explain one of several troubling new details from recent weeks: the court filing that revealed that, before he left Treasury, Marko Elez emailed two unnamed people at GSA the name or names of people with transaction details.

12. The forensic analysis also revealed that Elez sent an email with a spreadsheet containing PII to two United States General Services Administration officials. The PII detailed a name (a person or an entity), a transaction type, and an amount of money. The names in the spreadsheet are considered low risk PII because the names are not accompanied by more specific identifiers, such as social security numbers or birth dates. Elez’s distribution of this spreadsheet was contrary to BFS policies, in that it was not sent encrypted, and he did not obtain prior approval of the transmission via a “Form 7005,” describing what will be sent and what safeguards the sender will implement to protect the information.

Over a month after the investigation into what Elez was up to, Treasury reveals that he was alerting others to specific details about entities, with no explanation of why. That has nothing to do with the optimization he was supposed to be doing!

So sure, that could arise from an effort to target specific adversaries of Elon or Trump.

But that doesn’t explain another alarming revelation about DOGE: That Elon set up Starlink for the White House and GSA (not coincidentally, where most of his DOGE boys are working with the PII of Americans).

Starlink, the satellite internet service operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is now accessible across the White House campus. It is the latest installation of the Wi-Fi network across the government since Mr. Musk joined the Trump administration as an unpaid adviser.

[snip]

White House officials said the installation was an effort to increase internet availability at the complex. They said that some areas of the property could not get cell service and that the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure was overtaxed.

[snip]

In recent weeks, Starlink was also set up at the General Services Administration, which has served as a hub for Mr. Musk’s government-shrinking efforts, according to documents and people familiar with the service.

[snip]

It was also unclear if Starlink communications were encrypted. At a minimum, the system allows for a network separate from existing White House servers that people on the grounds are able to use, keeping that data separate.

“It’s super rare” to install Starlink or another internet provider as a replacement for existing government infrastructure that has been vetted and secured, said Jake Williams, a vice president for research and development at Hunter Strategy, a cybersecurity consultancy. “I can’t think of a time that I have heard of that.”

“It introduces another attack point,” Mr. Williams said. “But why introduce that risk?”

It’s certainly true that these two details could just be consistent with Elon’s plan to adopt totalitarianism himself, using his own personal satellite network.

But taken in tandem with other priorities of DOGE, such as dismantling almost the entirety of USAID, starting with the programs that Russia and Hungary most loathe, but also including those Republicans cherish, you need to at least consider whether this is an intelligence operation. Elon, his sidekick installed at the White House, David Sacks, and the VP they foisted on Trump, JD Vance, all parrot Russian propaganda. Dangles for Elon — cooperation on Mars! — have been included in Russia’s efforts to cultivate Trump.

And Musk was cemented as part of the this team at the same time as two other people whose inclusion in the Administration only helps America’s adversaries, Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr.

DOGE has not been cost-cutting, though that has confused the good government types and libertarians for months. Rather, DOGE has been capacity-cutting, even while it conducts the most intrusive data dive into Americans this side of consumer profiling.

I’m not saying a Russian intelligence operation is the only explanation for DOGE’s actions (again, I think a totalitarian plan is another missed possibility, though question why an aspiring totalitarian would want to destroy so much capability in advance of solidifying power).

I’m saying that experts like those from CATO look at it and cannot tell what it is doing, even while ignoring evidence that its claimed goal — cost-cutting — is false. But no one has ruled out something far more sinister is hiding behind a cognitive (if evolving) model designed to look familiar.

I’m working on a post on the Administration’s efforts to blackball law firms with ties to Trump’s imagined enemies.

As I’ll show, the effort builds on Trump’s Orwellian “Weaponization” effort; the two fact sheets involved in this effort (Perkins Coie; Paul Weiss) repeat Trump’s false claim that 51 spooks claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop “was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.” Each fact sheet then airs some personal grievances of Trump’s.

Then, Section 1 the Executive Orders (Perkins Coie; Paul Weiss) summarize that grievance. Based on that grievance, the order does the following:

Section 1: Purpose (airing of grievance)

Section 2: Security Clearance Review (in effect, suspension of any clearances held by firm attorneys)

Section 3: Contracting (stripping of federal contracts)

Section 4: Racial discrimination (accusing the firms of racial discrimination)

Section 5: Personnel (prohibiting the hiring of lawyers from targeted firms and prohibiting access to government facilities)

Most of scheme (and even more of DOJ Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle’s attempt to defend it in a hearing before Beryl Howell last week) rests on a national security claim, in turn built off the Section 2 Security Clearance order.

But a big part of it attempts to enforce Trump’s federal segregation efforts in private law firms. For each, the grievance section accuses the firm of “discriminat[ing] against its own attorneys and staff.”

In addition to undermining democratic elections, the integrity of our courts, and honest law enforcement, Perkins Coie racially discriminates against its own attorneys and staff, and against applicants. Perkins Coie publicly announced percentage quotas in 2019 for hiring and promotion on the basis of race and other categories prohibited by civil rights laws. It proudly excluded applicants on the basis of race for its fellowships, and it maintained these discriminatory practices until applicants harmed by them finally sued to enforce change.

My Administration is committed to ending discrimination under “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies and ensuring that Federal benefits support the laws and policies of the United States, including those laws and policies promoting our national security and respecting the democratic process. Those who engage in blatant race-based and sex-based discrimination, including quotas, but purposefully hide the nature of such discrimination through deceiving language, have engaged in a serious violation of the public trust. Their disrespect for the bedrock principle of equality represents good cause to conclude that they neither have access to our Nation’s secrets nor be deemed responsible stewards of any Federal funds.

Section 4 of the Perkins Coie order (which the Paul Weiss order incorporates), reads:

Sec. 4. Racial Discrimination. (a) The Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission shall review the practices of representative large, influential, or industry leading law firms for consistency with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including whether large law firms: reserve certain positions, such as summer associate spots, for individuals of preferred races; promote individuals on a discriminatory basis; permit client access on a discriminatory basis; or provide access to events, trainings, or travel on a discriminatory basis

(b) The Attorney General, in coordination with the Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and in consultation with State Attorneys General as appropriate, shall investigate the practices of large law firms as described in subsection (a) of this section who do business with Federal entities for compliance with race-based and sex-based non-discrimination laws and take any additional actions the Attorney General deems appropriate in light of the evidence uncovered.

In other words, Donald J. Trump has blackballed two law firms in significant part because they aim for diversity in their hiring practices.

Which led me to check the website for Jones Day, still the counterpart to what Perkins Coie used to be for Democrats, the law firm serving the Republican party.

And lo and behold, the Jones Day website looks like Federal government sites did until inauguration day.

Jones Day has a page celebrating its diversity firsts.

They have a page listing affinity groups the likes of which Trump has eliminated from Federal government.

And there are several other pages, including a 1L conference focused on diversity.

The documentation targeting Perkins Coie and Paul Weiss also target the firms for their pro bono work — the former for representing some trans service members challenging the DOD ban, and the latter because Jeannie Rhee represented DC in a lawsuit against January 6 culprits that DC recently dismissed with prejudice (in fact, there were three other Paul Weiss attorneys on the case, as well as a bunch from Dechart, but Rhee was the only one identified, even indirectly, in the backup to the blackballing attempt).

Laudably, Jones Day also does a great deal of pro bono work. It has a page boasting of its pro bono work including — among other things — “representing migrant minors and mothers with their children, many of whom were detained by the U.S. government after fleeing life-threatening, gender-based gang violence in their home countries.”

Jones Day and Our Pro Bono Culture

Ukraine

Immigration – The Border Project

Combatting Human Trafficking

Constitutional Policing and Civil Justice Reform, Standing Together

Advancing the Rule of Law in Africa

Hate Crimes Task Force

American Hospital Association (AHA) & Jones Day Human Trafficking Interview

Obviously, all of this is laudable! These firms are so powerful, it’s important that they remain accessible and give back.

But even the law firm to which Trump has remained loyal — a law firm at which Mizelle himself once worked as of counsel, a lawfirm whence Trump’s Acting Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Division as well as several top Civil Division lawyers came — engages in the same kind of laudable practices for which Trump is blackballing Perkins Coie and Paul Weiss. (Curiously, none of the Jones Day Civil Division personnel were at the Perkins Coie hearing last week.)

Update: EEOC sent out letters demanding info on DEI practices from 20 firms not named Jones Day.

The law firms that received letters from Acting Chair Lucas include:

1. A & O Shearman
2. Debevoise & Plimpton LLP
3. Cooley LLP
4. Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP
5. Goodwin Procter LLP
6. Hogan Lovells LLP
7. Kirkland & Ellis LLP
8. Latham & Watkins LLP
9. McDermott Will & Emery
10. Milbank LLP
11. Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP
12. Morrison & Foerster LLP
13. Perkins Coie
14. Reed Smith
15. Ropes & Gray LLP
16. Sidley Austin LLP
17. Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP
18. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP
19. White & Case LLP
20. WilmerHale

Covington security clearance order

Perkins Coie blackball order

Perkins Coie Fact Sheet

Paul Weiss blackball order

Paul Weiss Fact Sheet

Weaponization

Hunter Biden laptop order

I’d like to look at a few things that Chuck Schumer said in a wildly counterproductive interview.

After a squishy exchange about the horrible people running for NYC Mayor, Lulu Garcia-Navarro challenged Schumer for his focus on upcoming elections. Schumer noted that the courts are our best bulwark against Trump’s abuses (something that factored heavily in his decision to let the Continuing Resolution get a vote). But then Garcia-Navarro asked what happens when Trump starts ignoring judges, as he did Friday when deporting hundreds of mostly Venezuelans to El Salvador in defiance of an order from James Boasberg. Schumer said he hoped the five to six Senators who’ve spoke up in support of the courts would do so — but then suggested they might be more likely to do so in a few months, assuming Trump will become less popular.

You know, I’ve heard you and other Democratic leaders talk about the next election as if it’s just going to be another election like any other election. But there has been all of this discussion about Trump auguring the end of democracy. I worry about this. When I say we’ll win the election, I’m assuming democracy stays, but that we have to fight to make sure that happens. I think that Trump is destroying norms that have preserved our democracy for centuries, certainly for decades, and he’s destroying them, and he doesn’t care. What is our best bulwark? It’s the courts. And one of the things we were able to do, which is proving very, very good, is we put in 235 new judges. And they’re now hearing so many of the cases that attorneys general, private citizens, unions and others are bringing. We’ve had preliminary success.

Are they going to respect those court orders, do you think? That is the $64,000 question. So let us say the courts uphold this. And one of the people who will determine that more than any other is probably John Roberts, who is very conservative. I didn’t vote for him. But I do believe that he believes in the courts. And so I think that even at the highest level, if you get the Supreme Court upholding the law, it will matter. What if Trump keeps going? That’s the question everybody’s asking. And I worry about this a lot. I wake up sometimes at 2, 3 in the morning thinking about this. I believe this, and it’s a little bit in concert with what I’ve said to you before: I believe Republican senators, on this issue, will stand up. I’ve talked to some of them. About five or six have said publicly they will work to uphold the courts, and to uphold the law if Trump tries to break it. And we can do that legislatively if we have to. That’s my hope. That’s what we’ve got to work toward. And I think there’s a decent chance that that would happen, particularly if Trump, three months from now, is less popular. [bold NYT’s, italics mine]

Those five to six Senators have been silent since Trump’s open defiance was revealed on Saturday.

Then, later, Schumer again pointed to his confidence that Republican Senators would like some distance from Trump.

The Republicans would like to have some freedom from Trump, but they won’t until we bring him down in popularity. That happened with Bush in 2005. It happened with Trump in 2017. When it happens, I am hopeful that our Republican colleagues will resume working with us. And I talk to them. One of the places is in the gym. When you’re on that bike in your shorts, panting away next to a Republican, a lot of the inhibitions come off.

These passages were among those mocked by those prioritizing Schumer over Trump and Elon Musk. In the rush to condemn Schumer (who has canceled the book tour at which there were sure to be loud protests), people mocked the very idea that Republicans in the Senate would ever oppose Trump.

I think Schumer has earned a good deal of the criticism he’s getting, even if I’m certain it is distracting from the focus on Trump and Musk.

I part ways with the claim that Senators will never split from Trump.

To be very sure, Trump has garnered near-total fealty, from the House and Senate, since his inauguration in January. His grip on the GOP has tightened year after year since he first sold his grievance narrative in 2018. The reason the Senate had this no-win choice in the first place is because, for the first time in recent memory, the GOP House stood together on a funding vote. Many of these Senators are veritable cult members, spouting the craziest nonsense that Trump told him to say.

But to suggest Senators will never split from Trump is counterproductive for two reasons.

First, to suggest you can never get Republicans to break with Trump is to concede.

It is to give up on one of just a few theories of change available — with just (successful) mass protest and revolution left — and to give up on the one that could bring results most quickly. In the short term, at least, it would take just nine members of the House or four Senators to completely stall Trump’s agenda on a particular issue, and fewer members of the House to cause gridlock. There are that many members who oppose Trump on discrete issues (most notably, Ukraine and Medicaid funding), and exploiting that reality is a tool, however inadequate. Even if you think a mass protest movement would be more successful, pressuring the Senators who’ve enabled Trump so far is a necessary (and fairly easy) step to push back against Trump.

In the interview, Schumer seems to too readily adopt James Carville’s theory of change, to do nothing to accelerate this process (note, Carville’s op-ed assumed House Republicans could not mount the unity to fund government). Perhaps he wants to avoid pissing off the men he’s panting away next to in shorts in the Senate gym.

There’s a great deal that people can do to make it more likely Senators will oppose Trump. I try to make a point of calling out Joni Ernst publicly every time Pete Hegseth disappears the accomplishments of women soldiers, or Thom Tillis every time Hegseth makes the military less safe, or Roger Wicker every time Hegseth has an embarrassing faceplant, or Bill Cassidy every time RFK Jr does something to exacerbate the measles outbreak, or Jerry Moran every time DOGE makes a stupid cut of VA benefits, or Todd Young every time Tulsi Gabbard repeats Russian disinformation, or John Cornyn every time Marco Rubio cuts back on PEPFAR, or Tom Cotton every time Trump does something that will help China. These people haven’t hidden their disagreement on key issues or appointees with Trump. Yet, in spite of those disagreements, these people have all done things to support people they knew were wrong. As the consequences of their cowardice pile up — as measles spreads across the country from Texas and veterans lose their jobs — their complicity should be front and center.

And while right wing members of Congress are not publicly confronting Trump, some of them are pushing back quietly, mitigating some of the damage Trump is doing — sometimes even in ways that extend benefits beyond their own jurisdiction. According to the NYT, for example, Deb Fischer was among those who pushed Trump to reverse some of the firings at National Nuclear Security Administration (though NYT also reports that NNSA lost many key experts nevertheless).

And GOP pushback will go largely unnoticed elsewhere. After succeeding in strong arming vaccine propagandist RFK Jr’s confirmation to lead HHS, Trump withdrew the nomination for vaccine propagandist Dave Weldon to lead CDC, minutes before his confirmation hearing this week, because Weldon didn’t have and wouldn’t get the votes.

That’s all we’ll see of GOP pushback until proof of consequences of their own complicity and pressure on them mounts. But in a world where any kind of friction can slow the march of authoritarianism, even that non-public pushback bit matters, and it could provide definitive down the road.

By all means, scoff at Carville’s outdated naivete and Schumer’s unwillingness to more directly confront those he pants next to on the exercise bike.

But don’t abstain from pressuring right wingers to show some courage against Trump’s outrages.

First. Portugal:

Portugal is getting cold feet about replacing its U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets with more modern F-35s because of Donald Trump — in one of the first examples of the U.S. president undermining a potential lucrative arms deal.

The country’s air force has recommended buying Lockheed Martin F-35s, but when outgoing Defense Minister Nuno Melo was asked by Portugese media Público whether the government would follow that recommendation, he replied: “We cannot ignore the geopolitical environment in our choices. The recent position of the United States, in the context of NATO … must make us think about the best options, because the predictability of our allies is a greater asset to take into account.”

The defense ministry later sent a statement to POLITICO saying: “F-35s fighters were not ruled out from the F-16 replacement selection process.”

The ministry added a series of criteria that will be considered by Lisbon, including: “The geopolitical context” and “The extent of restrictions on the use of aircraft.”

Then, Canada:

Canada is actively looking at potential alternatives to the U.S.-built F-35 stealth fighter and will hold conversations with rival aircraft makers, Defence Minister Bill Blair said late Friday, just hours after being reappointed to the post as part of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new cabinet.

[snip]

There has been a groundswell of support among Canadians to kill the $19-billion purchase and find aircraft other than those manufactured and maintained in the United States.

And now Switzerland (Google Translate):

SP Switzerland demands from the new Federal Council and VBS Chairman Martin Pfister to stop the F-35 procurement immediately. In addition, a parliamentary commission of inquiry (PUK) is to clarify the chaos in the VBS and the RUAG scandal. In view of the growing international uncertainty and the dangerous solo efforts of US President Donald Trump, the Federal Council must finally show its position. Switzerland needs a security policy that is geared towards Europe and focuses on cooperation, peacebuilding and diplomacy.

«Since Trump took office, Swiss armaments purchases such as the US F-35 jet have increasingly proven to be major mistakes. Trump could block the jets at any time, blackmailing the countries concerned to submit to his dictation in foreign policy », says SP co-president Cédric Wermuth. «In addition, the costs for the F-35 rise to uncontrollable heights, while central questions about its usability and independence remain unanswered. It is therefore clear that the VBS must finally act and stop the procurement of this dysfunctional project. »

Since Trump cut intelligence sharing with Ukraine, thereby making certain military platforms unusable, this has been inevitable.

Trump has started destroying America’s best export: military toys.

Update: Turkey joins in:

Turkey has submitted a request to purchase 40 Typhoon fighter jets from BAE Systems.

This is reported by the publication Defense Security Asia.

The request has been sent to the Ministry of Defense of the United Kingdom, which is to make a decision on the sale of the aircraft and the export of British technology to Turkey.

The implementation of this potential export contract will be entrusted to the United Kingdom, namely to BAE Systems, which carries out partial production and final assembly of Typhoon fighters at the company in Wharton.