Trump's DOJ Losing Court Fights to Protect DOGE, Musk Secrecy

[CousinIT]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-24/trump-s-doj-losing-court-fights-to-protect-doge-musk-secrecy

FREE read: https://archive.ph/z00sw

US courts are foiling efforts by the Trump administration to keep under wraps information about the Department of Government Efficiency and the role that Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, played in it during his whirlwind stint with the White House last year.

A New York federal judge last week forced the government to reveal the names of DOGE employees and contractors. Earlier this month, a Maryland judge ruled Musk can’t be shielded from questions about the dissolution of the US Agency for International Development, while a judge in Washington ordered the Justice Department to investigate phone numbers Musk may have used for official business.

Musk, who poured millions of dollars into President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, served as DOGE’s public face as it orchestrated sweeping US spending cuts and thousands of government layoffs in the first half of 2025. The SpaceX and Tesla Inc. chief executive officer stepped down as a “special government employee” at the end of May.

The administration faced a wave of lawsuits from the start of Trump’s second term seeking to stop or slow down DOGE’s access to government systems and records with sensitive financial or personal data. While many of those cases are over, legal fights have lingered over transparency and whether Musk and DOGE-affiliated staff overstepped.

[multigraincracker]

1. So, they wanted to open records, but

not theirs?

[CousinIT]

2. Of course. They're Republicans after all. n/t

[OldBaldy1701E]

3. "...sweeping US spending cuts and thousands of government layoffs in the first half of 2025."

Now, come on media. Why won't you complete that sentence?

'...sweeping US spending cuts that only targeted those regulatory agencies that Musk and his fellow oligarchs despise, and thousands of government layoffs that crippled enforcement of anything that he did not like in the first half of 2025.'

Of course, they won't say this, because it is difficult to pronounce the word 'regulatory' with one's lips attached to that bloated orange anus.

[mysteryowl]

4. They gutted the federal government.

I wonder if what has been done could eventually collapse the US government from within.

Musk went around firing 1000's of government people and closing programs. He didn't have a clue as to what he took a wrecking ball to and its impact. There was no evaluation, just indiscriminate destruction.

This is government, not a corporation. There is a difference.

[CousinIT]

5. DOGE targeted women and people of color first. It fired others too but women and PoC

were top of every list.

[mysteryowl]

6. I didn't know that.

[yellow dahlia]

9. We still don't know all the damage, and the chipping away from the inside.

Can they collapse it? It is indeed their goal.

[eppur_se_muova]

7. Musk and his minions need to serve jail time before this chapter in our history can be considered closed.

"For what will it profit a man if he gains a trillion dollars, but spends his life behind bars ?"

[CBHagman]

12. Even worse, Musk gloated about closing USAID...

...and there has been a steady stream of reports on how many people are dying and might die because of the loss of lifesaving aid.

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” [Atul] Gawande wrote. He noted that the toll will continue to grow and may go unseen because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatments or vaccine-preventable illnesses—and because deaths are scattered.

“We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’” Gawande wrote.

There is more at the link, and here is another report on the same topic:

https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts

[Metaphorical]

8. Let's be blunt here

Musk came into this with likely several motives:

1. Eliminate as much evidence concerning misdeeds as possible within his various companies in the US.
2. Grab as much personal and corporate data as they could in the process that they could mine for blackmail and corporate espionage
3. Leave the various agencies unable to prosecute him in the future.
4. Lay coding land mines and trapdoors that gives them hacking access.

Ideology likely played a part - there was more than a bit of revenge at work as well - but there's no question that this was intended as a payoff to Musk for his help in "winning" the 2024 election, both through a barrage of misinformation and (perhaps) direct control of some election processing.

[yellow dahlia]

10. Yup.