A federal judge seems to have hammed the final nail into the effort to prevent Elon Musk’s DOGE team from accessing the information it needs to function. Friday evening, District Court Judge and aspiring webmaster (Peak Judicial Stupidity Achieved: Federal Judge Makes Himself the ‘Webmaster’ for Agency Websites – RedState) John D. Bates dismissed a revised complaint filed by the AFL-CIO seeking a requested temporary restraining order forbidding anyone “from providing any person outside the three agencies—namely, DOGE personnel—with access to records systems containing personal information or data.” The three agencies the AFL-CIO was trying to shield from scrutiny were the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“As it said previously,” wrote Judge Bates, “the Court has serious concerns about the privacy concerns raised by this case, and those concerns are all the graver now that the data includes information on all Americans who rely on Medicare and Medicaid, as well as countless consumers. However, on the record before it, the Court does not conclude that plaintiffs are entitled to the extraordinary relief of a temporary restraining order.”
This is the second bite at the apple in this particular case. A week ago, the AFL-CIA attempted the same argument before the same judge with the same results: Judge Slaps Back AFL-CIO Challenge to DOGE Access to Department of Labor Records – RedState. They would-be plaintiffs came back with what they thought was enough evidence of injury to convince a judge who was already hostile to the defendant to go along with it.
Slowly but surely, these multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration, often for exercising the barest amount of oversight of agency expenditures, are being settled. The Trump agenda is being slowed, but not as much as the first time around. The actions by the administration are much better planned and coordinated than they were in 2017, and the lawyering is much superior. When the dust settles, Trump will have had his way on these ridiculous ankle-biter cases, and I think he will score a huge win at SCOTUS that will crush the administrative state. More on that to come in a VIP post.
