Chuang, who is based in Maryland and was appointed by Obama, also cited social media posts from Musk, who writes frequently on X, the platform that he owns.
For example, Musk posted “we spent the weekend feeding USAID to the woodchipper” on Feb. 3.
The agency was being brought to a standstill at that time, with staff furloughed, spending halted and headquarters shut down.
“Musk’s public statements and posts… suggest that he has the ability to cause DOGE to act,” Chuang wrote in his ruling.
Harrison Fields, principal deputy press secretary at the White House, said Trump was fulfilling his campaign promise “to make the federal government more efficient and accountable to taxpayers.”
“Rogue bureaucrats and activist judges attempting to undermine this effort are only subverting the will of the American people and their obstructionist efforts will fail,” he said.
Anthony Coley, who led public affairs at the Justice Department during President Joe Biden’s administration, said statements involving civil litigation were always coordinated between his office and the West Wing.
“The words could be used to support what we’re doing or undermine what we’re doing,” he said. “It’s a carefully choreographed effort to make sure there was no daylight between what was said in the court of public opinion and what could ultimately play out in the court of law.”
In comparison to how things were done in the past, Coley said, Trump has a “ready-fire-aim approach of doing business.”
Trump doesn’t usually let legal disputes force him to turn down the volume. During a criminal investigation over his decision to keep classified records at Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House following his first term, Trump spoke extensively about the case in an interview with Fox News.
Longtime defense lawyers were startled—defendants are usually encouraged to keep mum while facing an indictment. But the situation panned out for Trump. His legal team delayed the case, and the special counsel’s office dropped the charges after he won the election because presidents can’t be prosecuted while in office.
DOGE has been the focus of nearly two dozen lawsuits. It’s often prevailed so far in cases involving access to government data, where several plaintiffs have struggled to convince judges to block the organization’s actions.
But it’s also run into challenges, such as a lawsuit over whether DOGE must comply with public records requests. The Trump administration asserted in court that DOGE is part of the White House, meaning it’s exempt.
Judge Christopher Cooper, also appointed by Obama, disagreed, siding with a government watchdog group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW.
“Musk and the President’s public statements indicate that USDS”—the original acronym for the organization that was renamed as DOGE—”is in fact exercising substantial independent authority,” wrote Cooper, who is based in Washington.
Cooper concluded that DOGE can “identify and terminate federal employees, federal programs, and federal contracts. Doing any of those three things would appear to require substantial independent authority; to do all three surely does.”
He ordered DOGE to start responding to requests about the team’s role in mass firings and disruptions to federal programs. The administration unsuccessfully asked the judge to reconsider, saying the judge “fundamentally misapprehended” the agency’s structure.
Just because Musk claims credit online for deep agency cuts, doesn’t necessarily translate to DOGE having authority in the eyes of the law, Stanford Law School professor Michael McConnell argued in a recent debate on the issue.
DOGE is recommending changes, he said, but it’s the agency heads who are actually putting them into effect.
“And that’s all that the courts are going to care about as to what the Supreme Court is going to do,” McConnell said at the debate hosted by the National Constitution Center.
