President Donald Trump’s administration has won a hearing at the Supreme Court in its fight to keep the records of the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency out of public view.

The justices agreed Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026, to hear the administration’s bid to withhold records from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the operation spearheaded by former administration adviser Elon Musk, in a case docketed as U.S. DOGE Service v. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The case reached the court through the Justice Department’s appeal in a suit brought by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which sued for records from DOGE’s work in the early days of Trump’s second term.

Arguments are likely in early 2027, with a decision expected by summer 2027. The Justice Department asked Monday, Oct. 19, for a briefing schedule that would allow arguments in February 2027.

The administration asked the justices to take the case, and their agreement to do so decides nothing about who ultimately wins. The arguments are set to turn on whether, and how far, discovery can proceed. A larger question sits underneath that procedural fight. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), in CREW’s reading, reaches DOGE as a federal agency; the administration counters that DOGE was a presidential advisory body the law does not reach.

The Records That Never Arrived

CREW filed its FOIA request on Jan. 24, 2025, seeking records showing how DOGE was structured and what it was telling other agencies. The documents never came, and the suit followed. CREW announced the lawsuit on Feb. 20, 2025.

The U.S. DOGE Service and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) were behaving as though the records law did not reach them, said Noah Bookbinder, then CREW’s president. It does, he said.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, ordered the government in March 2025 to speed up its handling of CREW’s request. He went further in a written opinion on April 15, 2025, holding that discovery could proceed. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that reviewed the discovery order came down largely on CREW’s side as well.

Roberts Paused It Once Before

The dispute has already been before the justices once. The Justice Department filed an emergency appeal in May 2025, and Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily paused the discovery orders on May 23, 2025.

On June 6, 2025, the court’s conservative majority found that Cooper had ruled too broadly, setting aside the district court’s discovery order by a vote of 6-3. The court said requests about what DOGE recommended, and whether agencies followed those recommendations, were “not appropriately tailored.”

The opinion added a caution for the lower courts: “Separation of powers concerns counsel judicial deference and restraint in the context of discovery regarding internal executive branch communications.”

Three Categories CREW Still Seeks

CREW narrowed its discovery after the remand, dropping some categories entirely. The narrowed request seeks only DOGE’s structure; its directives to cancel federal contracts and fire government workers; and examples of DOGE exercising substantial independent authority, such as gaining access to sensitive systems.

The D.C. Circuit found that narrowing consistent with the Supreme Court’s order. The government objected anyway.

The appeals court also cleared the way for CREW’s lawyers to depose Amy Gleason, who led DOGE as acting administrator, under oath. The judges had no authority to green-light that deposition, the administration contends, and they passed over a Supreme Court instruction to weigh separation-of-powers concerns while cutting into the independence and confidentiality of presidential advisers.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that the appeals court’s ruling “intrudes into the autonomy and confidentiality of presidential advisors.”

The appeals court followed the Supreme Court’s instructions precisely, CREW says. CREW’s lawyers wrote that undisputed facts in the public record, including Trump’s own statements, confirmed DOGE was “wielding enormous independent authority across the federal government.”

Nikhel Sus, CREW’s chief counsel, said: “The lower courts have uniformly ruled that CREW is entitled to discovery in this case.” He added, “We will continue to pursue transparency for the American people.”

Whether FOIA Reaches DOGE at All

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed FOIA into law in 1966, and the statute gave anyone in the public the right to ask any federal agency for its records. Johnson said at the signing that he hoped the government would balance national security, personal privacy and confidential deliberations against the benefit of a well-informed public.

A democracy depends on citizens who know what their government is doing, and that belief underpins the law, said Sara Creighton, an associate professor at Georgetown Law and previously deputy chief counsel at American Oversight. The question before the court now is discovery, she said, and she cautioned that implications beyond this administration would follow from a Supreme Court ruling that DOGE is not subject to FOIA.

“Whether an entity is subject to FOIA really determines how much information the public gets to know about it, and whether [entities] have any obligation to disclose their documents to the public,” Creighton said.

Margaret Kwoka, the Frank R. Strong Chair in Law at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, joined a brief supporting CREW as an outside legal expert. “Because so much about how DOGE operated … was not publicly explained, discovery is the only way to unearth key facts about DOGE’s operations and exercises of authority,” she said. Kwoka added, “Those details will illuminate whether it is in fact exercising independent authority or whether it is acting as an advisor to the President.”

The stakes reach well past the discovery fight, according to Ryan Mulvey, a senior policy counsel at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. “The fight ultimately in the DOGE case, and what CREW was hoping to test with its litigation, was whether DOGE [is] subject to FOIA,” he said.

Musk worked as a “special government employee” while leading DOGE and left the operation in May 2025. With DOGE’s help, thousands of federal workers lost their jobs and government funding was canceled, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was dismantled. DOGE was also behind efforts to shutter the U.S. Institute of Peace, and it drew concern over attempts to access sensitive databases at the IRS, the Social Security Administration and the Office of Personnel Management. A string of lawsuits followed during Trump’s early months back in office.

A Government Accountability Office analysis found the Trump administration spent $9.5 billion on employee administrative leave costs in 2025, a sixfold increase from 2023. The analysis attributed $6.7 billion of that to employees who accepted a buyout offer, part of DOGE’s initiative to shrink the federal workforce.

Experts say the court’s eventual ruling could shape government transparency far beyond this one case.