Cooper said DOGE also operated in “unusual secrecy,” leading the judge to conclude that complying expeditiously with the FOIA request from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the watchdog group that sued DOGE, was critical.

Cooper, a former President Barack Obama appointee, asked for a status update on DOGE’s compliance with his order by March 20.

His order comes after CREW sent DOGE wide-ranging FOIA requests seeking its organizational information, conflicts of interest and ethics waivers, and communications between DOGE and other agencies.

The judge’s order was an early-stage injunction. While Justice Department attorneys have argued DOGE is not subject to FOIA, they have not explained why, saying they will reserve their arguments for the phase of the lawsuit that examines the merits of the case.

Trump established DOGE as part of the Executive Office of the President to address wasteful spending, and the president laid out DOGE’s missions in two executive orders. The judge said that while the orders did not explicitly spell out that DOGE would exercise massive power, media reports and outside statements made by Trump and DOGE’s informal leader, Elon Musk, have made DOGE’s unique level of authority clear.

“Mr. Musk claimed credit for placing large numbers of [U.S. Agency for International Development] employees on administrative leave in February, revelling that ‘We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,’” Cooper said as an example, citing an X post by Musk.

The judge said Trump “trumpeted” that DOGE would have the ability “to dismantle Government Bureaucracy.” He gave numerous examples of the White House and Musk boasting about DOGE’s consequential activity.

Cooper also addressed concerns from CREW that DOGE employees were using an outside server to store employees’ information and communicating on Signal, an encrypted messaging app that can self-delete communication.

“This evidence gives rise to the possibility that representatives of the Defendant entities may not fully appreciate their obligations to preserve federal records,” Cooper wrote. “This is especially true for [DOGE], many of whose staffers are reported to have joined the federal government only recently and, to put it charitably, may not be steeped in its document retention policies.”

JUDGE DIRECTS DOGE TO SAVE RECORDS AMID TRANSPARENCY LAWSUIT

DOJ attorneys did not refute media reports about its Signal use or other surreptitious activities in a hearing last week. Still, they argued that CREW’s FOIA requests were among hundreds and did not deserve special treatment. CREW argued that the requested information by Monday this week was needed to inform Congress and the public in light of the looming government shutdown date of March 14.

The judge was unconvinced that CREW needed the information that quickly. He said DOGE’s records were not “so central” to the funding fight that they were needed to inform Congress’s appropriations process before the shutdown deadline, which CREW conceded was “likely” to be pushed off with a continuing resolution bill.