President Donald Trump’s hours-old administration has already been sued at least four times over the Department of Government Efficiency.
DOGE, which was announced by Trump soon after he won office, is designed to slash federal spending through budget cuts and firings. Elon Musk is set to lead DOGE after the White House announced Vivek Ramaswamy will be departing his role as co-chair.
The lawsuits were filed against the new administration on Monday as Trump was sworn in for his second term in the White House. Three of the lawsuits argue DOGE is not a government department, but rather an advisory committee. As a result, the lawsuits argue, the Trump administration has violated a federal transparency law called the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
FACA requires federal advisory committees to follow certain hiring and disclosure rules while being “objective and accessible to the public,” according to the General Services Administration. The law also requires these committees to allow the public to attend their meetings while keeping regular minutes.
The lawsuits argue DOGE has not met these requirements.
“DOGE is not exempted from FACA’s requirements,” according to one of the lawsuits filed by the public interest law firm National Security Counselors. “All meetings of DOGE, including those conducted through an electronic medium, must be open to the public.”
However, Trump is expected to sign an executive order that will establish DOGE as operating “within” the US government, Semafor reported, despite Trump’s initial statement that it would be an advisory board operating outside of government.
Should Trump sign the order, it would be among the 200 executive orders he is expected to issue within his first day of office.
It’s unclear what exactly will happen to these lawsuits if the order is signed. However, Kel McClanahan, an attorney with the National Security Counselors who authored the firm’s lawsuit, said Trump would have to turn DOGE members into “full government employees” to make a difference in the filing.
“That would open them up to a ton of rules they’re not going to want to abide by,” McClanahan said.
The National Security Counselors’s lawsuit also claims DOGE has already hired at least 17 employees, including several technology executives, former Trump staffers and personal associates of both Musk and Ramaswamy.
“Not a single member of DOGE is a federal employee or represents the perspective of federal employees, despite the evidence that DOGE intends to provide recommendations regarding federal employment practices and ways to reduce the size of the federal workforce,” the lawsuit reads.
Another one of the lawsuits — filed by the organizations Public Citizen, State Democracy Defenders Fund and the American Federation of Government Employees — makes a similar argument.
“DOGE’s members do not have a fair balance of viewpoints, meetings are held in secret and without public notice, and records and work product are not available to the public,” their lawsuit reads.
The third lawsuit, filed by Democracy Forward, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and several associations representing government employees, also argues DOGE must comply with federal checks.
“DOGE is operating unchecked, without authorization or funding from Congress and is led by unelected billionaires who are not representative of ordinary Americans,” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said in a statement.
The fourth lawsuit, which is from the Center for Biological Diversity, has also taken aim at the Trump administration over DOGE. However, the organization has not sued over alleged FACA violations.
Instead, the organization wants to “obtain public records showing how people claiming to represent…DOGE have interacted with the White House since the presidential transition began in November.”
The Independent has contacted the Trump administration for comment.
