First lawsuits against Trump admin target DOGE

[Thiệu Ngô]

Within minutes of Trump taking the oath of office, at least three lawsuits were filed in federal court in Washington, seeking to shut down Elon Musk’s department.

By Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney

The legal resistance to President Donald Trump has already begun.

Within minutes of Trump taking the oath of office, at least three lawsuits were filed in federal court in Washington, seeking to shut down Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” until it complies with transparency rules related to governmental advisory entities.

The lawsuits allege that the project Trump announced to target government waste violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act by giving private individuals roles in the government decision-making process without the public access the law requires.

Days after his election in November, Trump pledged to set up DOGE, headed by Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Trump mentioned the so-called department during his inaugural address and aides said he plans to issue an executive order later Monday formalizing the efficiency-seeking enterprise.

Ramaswamy recently stepped back from the project to run for governor in Ohio, but he and Musk previously floated such ideas as “large scale firing of government employees” culled at random from lists of such staffers.

The president does not have the authority to create official government departments without Congress passing a law to do so, but Trump seems intent on calling the anti-bureaucracy project a department regardless.

The first of the filed lawsuits, lodged by Public Citizen, the State Democracy Defenders Fund and the American Federation of Government Employees, contends DOGE has breached FACA, which the lawsuit says is intended to prevent such efforts from “turning into vehicles for advancing private interests in the federal decision-making process.”

“The battle to defend democracy will be not only fought in the court of law but also in the court of public opinion,” said Norm Eisen, a co-founder of State Democracy Defenders Action. “We and our colleagues at Public Citizen and AFGE wanted to make the point that not only do we have a powerful lawsuit … based on their partisan exclusion of members but also that we were unafraid to take action against the autocratic moves of the incoming president.”

The other cases were brought by National Security Counselors and Democracy Forward and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

A fourth lawsuit filed Monday by the Center for Biological Diversity seeks all records from the Office of Management and Budget relating to DOGE.

There are signs that the incoming Trump administration was expecting legal challenges to the money-saving effort. In December, Trump announced that Washington election lawyer William McGinley would serve as general counsel for the project.

Trump had previously tapped McGinley to serve as White House counsel, but later decided to hand that position to David Warrington, a lawyer who has represented him in civil suits stemming from the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.