The Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, also known as the U.S. DOGE Service, moved for reconsideration on Friday evening in a Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) case brought by Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington. The government seeks to reverse a district court judge’s prior ruling that it must process CREW’s FOIA request on an expedited basis. Judge Cooper had concluded that DOGE was, in fact, likely an “agency” as defined by the FOIA. Yet that decision—which has not gone uncriticized—was based mostly on factual information gleaned from CREW’s filings and anonymously sourced media reports. The government, for its part, had offered almost no argument about DOGE’s non-agency status when opposing CREW’s motion for a preliminary injunction.
The government’s start-of-weekend motion for reconsideration focuses, principally, on the district court’s “fundamental[] misapprehen[sion] [of] the structure of USDS” and its ostensible “conflat[ion] [of] the responsibilities assigned to USDS within the Executive Office of the President and DOGE teams within agencies.” The DOGE also protests CREW’s efforts to force a “novel and significant” merits question “in a preliminary posture on an expedited basis.” Indeed, the EOP component insists the court’s ruling “implicates substantial separation of powers” issues and “imposes a significant burden” on an entity with “no FOIA apparatus in place and no personnel or resources allocated for processing FOIA requests.” And all this comes on top of what the government claims was the court’s adoption of a novel theory of irreparable harm not even advanced by CREW in its original motion, let alone briefed fully by the parties. Notably, the DOGE motion is accompanied by a declaration from its now-publicly identified administrator, Amy Gleason.
The DOGE motion for reconsideration is opposed. FOIA Advisor will bring you an update on this important and interesting case once further argument from CREW is filed.