White House asks US Supreme Court to block access to DOGE records

May 21 (Reuters) - The Trump administration on Wednesday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to set aside a judge's order requiring Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency to answer questions and disclose documents about its operations.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington, D.C. ordered DOGE to turn over some records to the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), after finding that DOGE was likely a government agency covered by the federal Freedom of Information Act.
Cooper also said CREW was entitled to question DOGE's Acting Administrator Amy Gleason at a deposition. A federal appeals court declined on May 14 to put Cooper's order on hold.
President Donald Trump created DOGE in an executive order on January 20, the day he began his second White House term.
In seeking an emergency stay from the Supreme Court, Solicitor General John Sauer said Cooper's "extraordinarily overbroad and intrusive" order would distract DOGE from its mission to eliminate fraud, waste and abuse in the federal government.
He also called the order "an untenable affront to separation of powers," and said the government would likely succeed in showing that DOGE is a White House body exempt from FOIA, which lets the public review government records.
"This Court has rejected similar fishing expeditions into sensitive executive-branch functions, and it should not allow this one to proceed," Sauer wrote.
The case is In re US DOGE Service et al, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 24A1122.

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Seconds after delivering these lines at a news conference, FBI agents under Noem's authority manhandled and handcuffed Alex Padilla, a California senator who interrupted her to ask a question. Tom Homan, Trump's 'border czar', has threatened to arrest the governor, Gavin Newsom, and LA's mayor, Karen Bass, if they stand in the way of the immigration sweeps. At least two elected officials, New Jersey congresswoman LaMonica McIver and New York City comptroller Brad Lander, have indeed been arrested for alleged interference in Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. The military has so far stayed out of these headline-grabbing events, their role largely eclipsed by continuing immigration raids conducted by masked federal agents refusing to disclose their names or budget numbers, but experts and constitutional scholars say their very presence risks destabilizing what is already a volatile and politically charged situation. 'The risk of escalation, or of someone making a mistake, is always present and in these situations actually quite high,' said Chris Mirasola, a national security expert at the University of Houston Law Center. 'Just the deployment itself is escalatory.' In deciding to take charge of the California national guard, over Newsom's objections, Trump stopped short of invoking the Insurrection Act used by past presidents to help quell civil unrest, most recently during the 1992 LA riots when marines rode alongside southern California police patrols in burning neighborhoods. Rather, he invoked a rarely used power to mobilize the military to 'temporarily protect' federal property and personnel. Lyndon Johnson used the same protection power to guarantee the safety of civil rights demonstrators in Alabama in 1965, in defiance of the state's segregationist governor, George Wallace, and Richard Nixon used it in an ill-fated attempt to get the national guard to deliver the mail during a postal strike in 1970. But scholars said they were not aware of it being used any time since. Mirasola said he was a little perplexed, given the vehemence of Trump's rhetoric about 'violent, insurrectionist mobs', that the president opted for this softer approach. 'Maybe he just wanted the theatrics of getting the military on the streets,' Mirasola said. 'This is a way of doing that while still preserving some space to continue to escalate.' It was also possible, he suggested, that Trump could not talk his military commanders into taking a more aggressive approach. 'The military establishment is extremely allergic to the Insurrection Act,' he said. 'It's one of the few things bred into every single officer.' According to veterans and advocacy groups for service members being deployed to Los Angeles, the military also prides itself on being entirely apolitical and has no appetite to be drawn into a political conflict involving Trump or anyone else. Perhaps for this reason, the national guard and the marines have been barely visible in Los Angeles. At the first big downtown protest, on 8 June, the Los Angeles police moved protesters away from the national guard's staging area at a federal courthouse complex and parked their patrol cruisers in such a way that the guardsmen could not come out and intervene. Six days later, in the final stages of the No Kings protest, a hard core of protesters briefly faced off against a line of marines stationed on the front steps of the downtown federal building. 'Leave LA!' the crowd chanted, prompting the marines to deploy riot shields and push the protesters away from the building. The Los Angeles police quickly issued a dispersal order, sent in officers on horseback, and fired volleys of teargas to send most of the crowd scattering. Otherwise, the only reported incident has involved a military veteran who inadvertently crossed a line of police tape outside a federal building in west Los Angeles. One of the marines on guard wrestled him to the ground and cuffed him, but he was released shortly after and told reporters he was treated 'very fairly'. California has sued the Trump administration over the military deployment and seemed to score an early win in court last week when a district judge said the president had exceeded his authority and needed to return control of the state national guard immediately. An appeals panel has since reversed that ruling, however. Part of California's problem in arguing its case is that the national guard has been pressed into non-traditional activities with increasing frequency in recent years, undermining the notion of a strict separation between military and civilian activities. Several states, under both Republican and Democratic leadership, have drafted the guard into border patrol duties despite severe morale issues among the troops and opposition from the military brass. New Mexico has asked its national guard to work as substitute teachers in understaffed schools. Florida has had them filling in as prison guards, and New York has seconded its guard to police the New York City subway. Supporters of California's lawsuit argue that none of these scenarios are appropriate. And deploying the national guard for non-military purposes is even more inappropriate, they say, when it happens for an overtly partisan purpose over the objections of the state governor. 'The military shouldn't be in the business of domestic law enforcement. That's not what they're trained to do,' said Beau Tremitiere, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, an advocacy group supporting the suit. 'If Americans weren't aware of the risks posed by politicized domestic deployments by the military before the events in Los Angeles, they certainly are now. Healthy and respectful civil-military relations are yet another bulwark of US democracy that the president is trying to erode. We're all on notice.'