Legal win for Musk: federal judge clears DOGE access to seven federal agencies
Tanya Chutkan ruled against 14 Democratic attorneys general who had filed a class-action lawsuit to limit the scope of the Department of Government Efficiency.
DOGE recently announced that it saved the government $55 billion/Angela Weiss
Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) received a key judicial endorsement for their task of making the federal government more efficient. Federal Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled against 14 Democratic attorneys general who filed a lawsuit to limit DOGE's reach over seven government agencies.
The lawsuit was intended to generate a temporary restraining order to prevent DOGE from firing employees or accessing data from the Departments of Education, Labor, Health and Human Services, Energy, Transportation, Commerce and the Office of Personnel Management.
"In these circumstances, it must be indisputable that this court acts within the bounds of its authority. Accordingly, it cannot issue a TRO [temporary restraining order], especially one as wide-ranging as Plaintiffs request, without clear evidence of imminent, irreparable harm to these Plaintiffs. The current record does not meet that standard," the judge wrote in her ruling.
Although led by New Mexico, the court action was supported by Arizona, Michigan, Maryland, Minnesota, California, Nevada, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii. Although Nevada and Vermont have Republican governors, their attorneys general are currently Democrats.
"There is no greater threat to democracy than the accumulation of state power in the hands of a single, unelected individual," noted the lawsuit drafted by Raul Torrez, New Mexico's attorney general.
At the hearing held last Monday, the judge had shown doubt as to whether the states had met the legal standard necessary to grant a temporary restraining order.
Judge Chutkan was nominated to the US District Court for the District of Columbia by President Barack Obama and rose to national fame in 2023, when she was left in charge of the criminal case against Donald Trump for allegedly trying to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Chutkan ultimately dismissed the charges in late November after it was confirmed that Trump would return to the White House.
DOGE announced $55 billion in savings
As they remarked, the achievement is "a combination of fraud detection/elimination, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, staff reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings."
In turn, they reported that the largest contract savings were in the following agencies: the Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management, the Office of Health and Human Services, and in fifth place the Department of Agriculture.
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