Plaintiffs asked for expedited discovery to help speed up their case.
A Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) worker and three other federal officials must sit down and answer questions under oath in a legal case, a federal judge ruled on Feb. 27.
The four depositions will seek information that is essential to deciding on a motion for preliminary injunction, U.S. District Judge John Bates
said in a 16-page order. The motion, which has not yet been filed, is expected to ask to block DOGE access to some government systems.
“To help ensure the depositions are limited to the proper topics, and to help decrease the burden on defendants, the Court will limit plaintiffs to a total of eight hours for their four depositions,” Bates wrote.
The depositions must be completed no later than March 24.
The discovery process will start with written questions. The depositions will be aimed at resolving “any factual issues left ambiguous following the production of written discovery,” plaintiffs said.
It is not clear which DOGE employee will be questioned. The DOGE employee will be asked about the leadership and decision-making structure of the department, as well as the roles and responsibilities of all DOGE workers who have been working with the agencies the plaintiffs sued.
The other depositions will involve a Department of Labor official, a Department of Health and Human Services official, and a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau official. The questions to those officials will include which DOGE employees have been accessing the agencies’ systems and whether the DOGE employees have installed any software on the systems.
The White House declined to immediately provide comment on the ruling. The Department of Justice did not return a query.
The AFL-CIO and other groups brought the case earlier in February, alleging that DOGE is violating laws by accessing sensitive systems at the three agencies.
Bates granted a motion
filed by the plaintiffs, who had requested the expedited discovery because, they said, there have been ambiguous and conflicting answers on matters pertaining to DOGE, including its structure.
Billionaire Elon Musk, a top adviser to President Donald Trump, had been publicly perceived for weeks as the leader of DOGE. The White House in mid-February
said in a court filing that Musk was not a DOGE employee and did not hold decision-making authority. Shortly afterward, Trump
said Musk was in charge of the department.
The White House has also
said that former health care executive Amy Gleason is DOGE’s acting administrator.
Government lawyers had
urged the judge to reject the motion, arguing that the plaintiffs’ motion “seeks to leapfrog the normal course of litigation ... to gather extensive discovery before the Court has had an opportunity to adjudicate whether it has jurisdiction to hear this dispute.”
Unions and other groups have lodged a slew of lawsuits against DOGE and government agencies working with the cost-cutting advisory body. A judge in one of the cases
recently blocked the Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management from sharing sensitive data with DOGE, concluding that the privacy rights of plaintiff members would be violated absent a restraining order.
Bates previously
declined a request in the AFL-CIO case for a temporary restraining order, finding that the unions did not show that they were substantially likely to succeed in their claims. He is weighing whether to grant a preliminary injunction, which would prevent DOGE from accessing the systems while the case goes on.
Bates said on Feb. 27 that he was granting the request for expedited discovery because “it is necessary to determine the contours of the agency actions that plaintiffs challenge.”
