The justices agreed Tuesday to decide whether Amy Gleason, who ran DOGE, must sit for a deposition, and whether DOGE must answer nine written questions about which government systems it entered over the objections of the people who ran them. Trump had already let DOGE expire, three months ago, on the date his own order set.
Donald Sherman runs the watchdog that wrote the questions, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. His group sued in early 2025 for DOGE's records under the Freedom of Information Act. D. John Sauer, Trump's solicitor general, says DOGE was a presidential advisory body and the law does not reach it. Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington let the group ask a short list of questions to settle that: how DOGE was built, which contracts and workers it ordered cut, and the "specific instances" where it acted on its own, "such as by gaining access to information systems over the objections of agency employees." Cooper also let the group put Gleason under oath.
Cooper already knows part of the answer. In March 2025 he found DOGE had "obtained unprecedented access to sensitive personal and classified data and payment systems," in at least one case over the objection of an agency security director "who was later removed." That is the hackathon: DOGE wiring together government databases that had always been kept apart.
https://www.narativ.org/p/what-doge-will-know-about-you
Sauer has carried the questions to the justices once already. In June 2025 the justices froze Cooper's order, 6-3, on an emergency ruling and told the appeals court to narrow it. The group cut its list. The appeals judges let the rest proceed, and in December the full bench refused to hear it again. Sauer petitioned again in March. Nineteen months after Cooper's finding, nobody has answered a single question.
Trump built DOGE to die. He signed it into being on Jan. 20, 2025, as a "Temporary Organization" with a July 4, 2026 expiry, and it kept the date. Elon Musk, who announced its contract cuts, left in May 2025. Its last post said "the formal mission of DOGE has come to an end," and the website went dark. Gleason now runs a health-technology office at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Russell Vought, the budget director, said there were no plans for a closing report.
So why is Sauer spending a Supreme Court term on an office whose own last post says its mission is over? He is spending it on what Gleason would have to say under oath.
