US courts are foiling efforts by the Trump administration to keep under wraps information about the Department of Government Efficiency and the role thatElon Musk, the world’srichest person, played in it during his whirlwind stint with the White House last year.

A New York federal judge last week forced the government toreveal the namesof DOGE employees and contractors. Earlier this month, a Maryland judge ruled Musk can’t be shielded from questions about the dissolution of theUS Agency for International Development, while a judge in Washington ordered the Justice Department to investigate phone numbers Musk may have used for official business.

Musk, who poured millions of dollars into PresidentDonald Trump’s reelection campaign, served as DOGE’s public face as it orchestrated sweeping US spending cuts and thousands of government layoffs in the first half of 2025. TheSpaceXandTesla Inc.chief executive officer stepped down as a “special government employee” at the end of May.

The administration faced a wave of lawsuits from the start of Trump’s second term seeking to stop or slow down DOGE’s access to government systems and records with sensitive financial or personal data. While many of those cases are over, legal fights have lingered over transparency and whether Musk and DOGE-affiliated staff overstepped.

As judges grapple with whether what DOGE did was lawful, they’ve overruled the administration’s opposition to sharing information with plaintiffs that sued.

“You really are seeing an unwillingness from the government to shed any type of light or any type of accountability for what happened during that time,” saidTianna Mays, legal director of Democracy Defenders Fund, which is representing challengers in the US aid agency fight in Maryland.

Read More:What Is DOGE Without Elon Musk?: QuickTake

In a suit over DOGE access toSocial Security Administrationrecords, the Justice Departmentalerted a judgein January about newly discovered communications between DOGE team members and an as-yet-unidentified “political advocacy group,” which wanted help analyzing state voter rolls. Government lawyers acknowledged the revelation undermined past statements to the court that DOGE needed the access to “maximize efficiency and productivity” at the agency.

Skye Perryman, president ofDemocracy Forward, which brought the Social Security Administration case, said the “bombshell” filing underscored concerns about the security of Americans’ personal information as well as the “trend of the government’s misrepresentations to federal courts.”

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement that “DOGE assisted in conducting unprecedented and historic levels of deregulation in the federal government and this ongoing and invasive witch-hunt to protect the federal bureaucracy at the expense of the American taxpayer is a shameful abuse of the judiciary.”

Source: Drudge Report