As one federal judge issues temporary restraining order, another questions DOGE’s constitutionality
A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order on Monday blocking certain agencies from sharing sensitive records with President Donald Trump’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE.
Several labor unions filed a lawsuit earlier this month against the Education Department and the Office of Personnel Management to prevent them from forking over data to DOGE as it seeks to fire workers, end federal contracts and unilaterally close agencies.
U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman of Maryland said Monday the unions were likely to succeed in their claims that the Trump administration is violating the Privacy Act of 1974.
“Specifically, the plaintiffs have shown that Education and OPM likely violated the Privacy Act by disclosing their personal information to DOGE affiliates without their consent,” Boardman, an appointee of former President Joe Biden (D), wrote in her order. [Continue reading…]
A federal judge in Washington said on Monday that the way the Trump administration set up and has been running Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency may violate the Constitution.
The skepticism expressed by the judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, did not come as part of a binding ruling, but it suggested that there could be problems looming for Mr. Musk’s organization, which is also known as the U.S. DOGE Service.
“Based on the limited record I have before me, I have some concerns about the constitutionality of U.S.D.S.’s structure and operations,” Judge Kollar-Kotelly said at a hearing in Federal District Court in Washington. She expressed particular concern that it violated the appointments clause of the Constitution, which requires leaders of federal agencies to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Mr. Musk was neither nominated nor confirmed.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s remarks about the Musk operation were part of a civil case brought by two labor unions and a group representing millions of American retirees. They are seeking an injunction that would bar the Musk team from accessing sensitive records maintained by the Treasury Department.
Last week, a federal judge in Manhattan, entertaining a similar legal issue, banned Mr. Musk’s cost-cutting group from regaining access to the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems until the conclusion of a separate lawsuit claiming that its access to the records is unlawful.
The suits are among several challenging Mr. Musk’s wide-ranging efforts to scrutinize government spending and slash the federal work force, which have spawned dueling directives from Mr. Musk and the heads of various federal agencies, as well as termination notices that were quickly rescinded.
Some of the suits have directly questioned the constitutionality of the Musk operation. But Judge Kollar-Kotelly was the first federal judge handling one of the cases to hint at how she might rule on that critical issue.
The judge also indicated that she had serious concerns about how the organization is being run. Her concerns emerged from unresolved questions about who is in charge of the U.S. DOGE Service and what role Mr. Musk plays in its operations.
At the hearing, Judge Kollar-Kotelly repeatedly asked a lawyer for the government, Bradley Humphreys, to identify the service’s administrator. He was unable to answer her. [Continue reading…]
The Trump administration has told federal agency leaders that they can ignore the public decree from Elon Musk to effectively fire employees who do not send in bullet-point summaries of their work last week, according to three people familiar with the matter, a break with the billionaire who has exerted significant power to slash the 2.3-million-person federal workforce.
The Office of Personnel Management, a federal agency that functions as the government’s HR department, delivered the news to agency chief human capital officers on a call midday Monday, according to one of the people, an agency official on the call, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations.
Another person briefed on the call said that OPM is also looking at weekly reporting for government departments. But the person said that OPM was unsure what to do with the emails of employees who responded so far and had “no plans” to analyze them.
Later in the day, though, Trump suggested non-responders could still be terminated, while Musk wrote on X they would be given “another chance” to write back before being fired.
Musk on Saturday posted on his social media platform, X, that federal employees would receive an email asking for a list of what they did at work last week and would be considered as having resigned if they did not reply by Monday at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. Shortly thereafter, an email blast from OPM relaying the request, without the termination threat, went out to millions of people, including federal judges and workers in the legislative branch — prompting confusion as agency heads struggled to apply the guidance to their particular work. Even before the latest directive, some agencies told workers not to comply, fearful that they might, at OPM’s behest, be disclosing information that was sensitive or important to national security.
The patchwork of conflicting, evolving guidance and ensuing confusion has become a mainstay of the Musk-led U.S. DOGE Service’s campaign to shrink the federal government — an effort that has inspired considerable backlash from the courts, lawmakers and people inside the bureaucracy. Also Monday, a federal watchdog agency said the Trump administration’s firings of a handful of probationary federal workers were illegal and requested a 45-day stay of their terminations. Meanwhile, in the halls of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, TV monitors showed a looping video of an apparently falsified scene — possibly AI-generated — depicting President Donald Trump sucking Musk’s toes with “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING” written over the loop, according to people at HUD who shared images. [Continue reading…]