Judge Delivers Massive Blow to DOGE Quest to Keep Everything Secret

A federal judge ruled Monday night that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency must open its records to the public under federal law.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper said the DOGE office has so much power and “unusual secrecy” that its internal documents should be urgently released under the Freedom of Information Act.

“The authority exercised by USDS across the federal government and the dramatic cuts it has apparently made with no congressional input appear to be unprecedented,” Cooper wrote in his 37-page ruling, taking direct aim at Musk’s claim that the pseudo-agency is running transparently.

Cooper cited evidence that has come out in previous court cases as well as media reports about DOGE’s vast authority, contradicting the White House’s assertions that Musk is merely an adviser to the president. The office is moving quickly and giving shifting explanations on its leadership, Cooper said, demanding that DOGE release its records on a “rolling” basis within weeks.

“The rapid pace of [DOGE’s] actions, in turn, requires the quick release of information about its structure and activities,” Cooper wrote. “That is especially so given the secrecy with which DOGE has operated.”

The ruling is a big blow for Musk and DOGE, which has engaged in a mass purge of federal employees across multiple agencies without regard to their critical jobs. These include bird flu experts and people who work on the country’s nuclear arsenal, and the government has scrambled to rehire some of them. Monday night’s ruling will undoubtedly be challenged by the Trump administration, but for now, at least, Musk and Trump are being held to some measure of accountability.

Things have gotten so bad, Fox News is finally blaming Donald Trump for the economy.

After the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 890 points Monday, pulling back from a drop of 1,100 points at one point, Fox News hosts openly blamed the disorganization of the Trump administration.

“The commerce secretary and the president are having different messages on the same day,” said guest Jonathan Kott, a former adviser to ex-Senator Joe Manchin. “That’s not giving the market any sort of ease or certainty for investors. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if we have an even greater crash.”

“The Dow is 1,500 points below where it was when Trump took office—that’s not a good look,” host John Roberts noted.

The broader S&P 500 also plummeted Monday, dropping by 2.7 percent. The Nasdaq Composite dropped by 4 percent.

Last week, Trump’s steep tariffs on some of America’s closest trading partners, Canada, Mexico, and China, led to a major sell-off in the stock market and a volley of new forecasts predicting a recession on the horizon. Washington Post economic columnist Heather Long said on MSNBC that it was “hard to envision” prices coming down amid the ensuing trade war.

In the wake of the harsh reality check about tariffs, the Trump administration’s messaging on this massive sell-off has been confusing.

During an interview on Fox News Sunday, Trump refused to answer easy questions about whether the U.S. economy was headed for another recession, saying, “I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition because what we’re doing is very big.” It seems that Trump’s inability to say whether there would be a recession has only sowed more doubt in the market this week.

Meanwhile, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick insisted on NBC News’s Meet the Press Sunday that Americans should “absolutely not” brace for a recession, and that the country was headed for a period of “transition.” And last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that the U.S. economy might enter a “detox period.”

This story has been updated.

Elon Musk’s social media company couldn’t stay online Monday.

X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, was down for the better part of the day, leaving users and critics to question how involved Musk should be in paring down the federal government when his own history of trimming X had effectively rendered the site unusable.

Hours after the site first crashed, Musk took to his account to vaguely blame an outside force for the failure.

“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against 𝕏,” Musk posted when the site momentarily came back online. “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”

But even if a large group coordinated the attack, Musk’s decision to clear house at Twitter in 2022 would have been enough to hamper the site’s functionality. Shortly after acquiring the site that year, Musk chose to lay off thousands of the site’s employees in order to cut spending. That included staff in departments focusing on ethical AI, marketing and communication, search, public policy, wellness, and other teams, CNN reported at the time.

By January 2023, the company had shed roughly 80 percent of its employees, leaving it with fewer than 550 full-time engineers, according to internal records obtained by MSNBC. One anonymous outbound employee told the network that the massive slashes would leave the remaining staff spread incredibly thin, making it “harder to maintain the service reliably.”

By Musk’s own admission, the $44 billion investment lost 90 percent of its value in the months after he acquired it in October 2022.

Two groups immediately tried to take responsibility for taking down X Monday.

Users on Reddit shared screenshots of a site that they claimed X’s web address temporarily redirected to. That page called itself “Operation DreadNought,” and labeled itself as a part of Anonymous, the decentralized international hacking group.

“We are here to fight against the fascism that has taken root in America,” the page read. “The Republican party, MAGA, Trump, and Musk are imbeciles who are drunk on power and get off on trampling down others. The American people are suffering for it. The World is suffering for it.”

Simultaneously, the pro-Palestine hacking group Dark Storm Team also claimed the DDoS attack, in a public Telegram post.

But in an interview with Fox Business on Monday, Musk claimed—without providing proof—that the attack stemmed from a third entity.

“We’re not sure exactly what happened, but there was a massive cyberattack that tried to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area,” he said.

Voters in North Carolina voted for Donald Trump by a nearly four-point margin in November, believing that the MAGA leader would help state residents recover from storm damage in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Then he didn’t.

Trump supporters in the Tar Heel State are still waiting for the president to direct disaster relief funds to rebuild and restore local infrastructure. Five months on since the hurricanes battered 27 counties across North Carolina, approximately “300 privately owned bridges in this county have yet to be fixed.” Those reminders are dressed with red banners, urging Trump to make the bridges “great again,” reported The Washington Post.

The residual desperation has left even Trump’s biggest champions questioning their support.

“There was a lot of desperation here and a lot of hurt at the time when he came and when the signs went up,” Robin Ollis, a local who runs a horseback riding company, told the Post. “The people that have been suffering from this storm, really, there was so much anticipation for Trump to come in.”

Trump and his allies scorched the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the midst of the disaster, spreading unfounded conspiracies that the lead response agency was out of money, and that the Biden administration had diverted funds from FEMA to assist undocumented immigrants in entering the country. (FEMA administrators have fervently and repeatedly denied this.) Conservatives, at the time, claimed that working with the White House to expedite disaster relief “seemed political,” and even conspiratorially suggested that the hurricanes were a government manipulation.

Days after his inauguration, Trump visited the damage, spouting that FEMA had failed to help the region while pitching an idea to do away with the agency altogether in favor of handing the money directly to the states. But none of that has come to fruition.

Since then, Trump has actively worked to dismantle FEMA. The administration is blocking states across the nation, including California and Michigan, from accessing preapproved relief. A coalition of Democratic-led states has sued the federal government, claiming that “hundreds of millions of dollars in FEMA grants” are still inaccessible.

“I have found myself questioning this new administration,” Gary Hicks, a North Carolina Trump voter, told the Post. “What are they going to do? … I know he’s only been in office for a month. But let’s start seeing some results.”

But North Carolinians aren’t the only ones upset with the Trump administration’s direction. Conservative voters across the country have raised their voices against Trump’s agenda, lamenting the administration’s decision to nix thousands of civil servant jobs.

“Nobody that I’ve talked to understood the devastation that having this administration in office would do to our lives,” Jennifer Piggott, a recently dismissed Treasury Department employee, told Reuters. Piggott told the newswire that she would not have supported Trump in the election if she knew then what she knows now.

An 80-year-old veteran chained himself to a sign near the White House Monday to protest Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s massive cuts to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

Richard Hobcraft Allan III, a resident of Charlottesville, Virginia, locked himself to a metal post outside of the presidential building Monday morning, holding a pipe around his hands reading “King Trump and Pres Musk are killing veterans.”

Allan said he and his fellow veterans “are marshaling on [March] 14th at noon and marching all over the country to say one simple thing: Veterans will not stand for this any longer.”

“We believe that an unelected leader is killing our fellow veterans and something must be done. All over our country, people are standing up, making noise in the streets, and stating ‘we cannot go on as usual,’” Allan continued. He later joked with one of the Metropolitan Police officers who responded to the scene.

“I’ve been told that some of you guys are real humane,” he said.

“We try to be,” the officer replied.

“If you could slip over here with just a shot of bourbon—” Allan said, causing the officer to laugh.

Ultimately, police decided to leave Allan attached to the post.

“My intention had been to be here until I was broken out of here and arrested, and I was proud to face arrest in the name of my fellow veterans,” Allan said, but would ultimately have to free himself, and called his small protest an “appetizer” for the larger veterans’ march on Saturday. 

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned ICE’s detainment of Mahmoud Khalil, calling it a “tyrannical” move.

“Violating rule of law, actually,” AOC wrote on Monday, responding to an assertion from Katie Miller, wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, that Khalil’s kidnapping was mere “rule of law.”

“You are shredding the Constitution of the United States to go after political enemies. Seizing a person without reason or warrant and denying them access to their lawyer is un-American and tyrannical,” she continued. “Anyone celebrating this should be ashamed.

“If the federal government can disappear a legal US permanent resident without reason or warrant, then they can disappear US citizens too,” she wrote in a separate post. “Anyone—left, right, or center—who has highlighted the importance of constitutional rights + free speech should be sounding the alarm now.”

ICE arrested Khalil, a leader in Columbia University’s pro-Palestine movement, as he returned to his home Saturday night, despite the fact that he has a green card. ICE initially informed Khalil’s lawyer, Amy Greer, that they had revoked his student visa. When Greer brought up Khalil’s green card—which would make it much harder to detain him—ICE said that was revoked too, and hung up on her. Khalil is thought to now be in an ICE facility in Louisiana.

Trump was delighted by ICE’s actions and took to Truth Social to warn that this is the first arrest of many.

“Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, all but confirming that advocating for Palestinian self-determination is now a crime.

“We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again. If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply. Thank you!”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been advising a holistic medical clinic in West Texas that has been distributing unproven alternative medicines during the deadly measles outbreak, Mother Jones reported Monday.  

Local historian Tina Siemens and Dr. Ben Edwards of Veritas Wellness in Lubbock, Texas, have been working to distribute alternative medicines such as vitamin C, cod liver oil, and the inhaled steroid budesonide, amid the growing outbreak. Siemens said they spoke with Kennedy last week to discuss the culture of a Mennonite community that has found itself at the epicenter of the outbreak due to its low rates of measles vaccinations. 

Siemens claimed that the Mennonites had been unfairly blamed for the spread of the disease and that not every family had made the decision not to vaccinate their children. “The media is spinning it as it’s all the unvaccinated, uneducated Mennonites, and that’s just not the truth,” she told Mother Jones. 

Last week, Siemens was involved in an online fundraiser to raise money to provide the children of Seminole, Texas, with alternative medicines, in partnership with the Children’s Health Defense, the vaccine misinformation group that Kennedy helmed until he began his failed run for the White House last year. 

The fundraiser was to “defray the cost of essential vitamins, supplements and medicines necessary to treat children enduring complications from the measles virus and other illnesses,” and directed all donations to Siemens and Brian Hooker, who is the Children’s Health Defense’s chief scientific officer. The fundraiser had garnered more than $13,000 in donations as of Monday.

“I’m very, very grateful that we live in a community that has that choice,” Siemens told Mother Jones. “We live in a state that has that choice, for the parents to make that choice for their family.”

But it’s possible that people like Siemens and Edwards could stand to profit from that choice. 

Vitamin A is found in cod liver oil, the dietary supplement being pushed as an alternative medicine and sold for a whopping $48 per bottle by Veritas Wellness. 

Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is now under Kennedy’s purview, added a new section on the use of vitamin A to treat measles—horrifying health experts who say there is weak evidence that it can be used as a treatment and that vaccination is the only proven method of prevention. Kennedy touted the additional resources about vitamin A in an op-ed published by Fox News last week. 

Meanwhile, a bottle of vitamin C costs only $38 on the site—a real steal!

Ruth Marcus, an award-winning political columnist and longtime editor at The Washington Post, has resigned after her opinion piece criticizing Post owner Jeff Bezos was killed. This is another installment in the backlash to the controversial internal changes that Bezos has made in an attempt to better align the paper he owns with the Trump administration.

“Jeff’s announcement that the opinion section will henceforth not publish views that deviate from the pillars of individual liberties and free markets threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what the owner has deemed acceptable,” Marcus wrote in her resignation letter, according to NPR.

“Will’s decision to not … run the column that I wrote respectfully dissenting from Jeff’s edict—something that I have not experienced in almost two decades of column-writing—underscores that the traditional freedom of columnists to select the topics they wish to address and say what they think has been dangerously eroded,” she continued, referring to the paper’s CEO and publisher, Will Lewis.

Marcus had been working at the Post for 40 years.

Lewis led a severe revamp of the Post newsroom, after which the paper decided to conveniently stop making presidential endorsements last year. Then there was the paper’s painfully ironic slogan change, Bezos’s front-row appearance at Trump’s inauguration, and the Post’s suppression of an advertisement critical of Elon Musk. It’s clear to everyone—especially those within—that the Post’s leadership has placed political agendas over basic journalistic integrity.

Donald Trump is celebrating the detention of Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, despite his being a green card holder.

The president boasted about Khalil’s arrest on his Truth Social account Monday afternoon, calling him “a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University,” and warned, “This is the first arrest of many to come.”

“We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” Trump posted. “Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again.”

Last week, Trump threatened to pull funding from schools that allow “illegal protests” and added that “agitators” would be “imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested.” Following this, the Trump administration canceled $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University for what it called “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

The president is making good on his threats and gloating about it, and the fact that Khalil is an Algerian citizen of Palestinian origin suggests that the administration’s first targets may be ethnically motivated. Plus, it overlaps with Trump’s goal of mass deportations of immigrants, only in this case, the president is including legal immigrants in this attack on the First Amendment. Will Democrats stand up and demand free speech protections, or will they oppose pro-Palestinian protesters?

The Supreme Court is taking up a case to decide whether states can ban conversion therapy—a widely discredited method of changing a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity that has proven both harmful and ineffective—or if such a ban is an infringement on First Amendment rights.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear Chiles v. Salazar, where Kaley Chiles, a Colorado therapist, challenged a state law outlawing “any practice or treatment … that attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Chiles has asserted her right to treat individuals with “same-sex attractions or gender identity confusion” who seek to “prioritize their faith above their feelings,” according to The Hill. Chiles said in court documents that she only works with adults and children “who are internally motivated to seek counseling.”

The Supreme Court has refused to hear similar cases in the past, but now its conservative majority, which has appeared enthusiastic about the prospect of upholding bans on gender-affirming care for transgender youths, may weigh an important question that will affect the lives of LGBTQ people across the country. There are currently 20 states that have laws restricting conversion therapy.

The suit is backed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative legal group that led challenges to nationwide abortion access. A press release on the ADF’s website alleged that by not allowing her to perform conversion therapy, Chiles was in turn “being forced to promote the government’s gender ideology.”

“Many of Chiles’ clients come to her because they share her Christian worldview and faith-based values. These clients believe their lives will be more fulfilling if they are aligned with the teachings of their faith. Yet Colorado law censors Chiles from speaking words her clients want to hear because the government does not like the view she expresses,” the press release said.

In 2022, a Colorado district court rejected the suit, and in 2023, a panel of judges at the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law did not regulate speech but professional conduct—and it seems that question will determine the outcome of this case. States are legally able to regulate professional conduct as a means of preventing malpractice. To overturn that rule could potentially undermine all state efforts against professional malpractice.

The Supreme Court is expected to hear the case during its next annual term, which begins in October.