An organization critical of President-elect Donald Trump will hit the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with a lawsuit on Monday.
National Security Counselors (NSC), a nonprofit public interest law firm, will sue DOGE on Monday afternoon and allege that Elon Musk’s cost-cutting advisory organization violates an existing law that sets rules for things like disclosure and hiring practices at executive branch advisory committees, the Daily Caller News Foundation confirmed. NSC has been highly critical of Trump and Musk in post-election posts to Bluesky, a social media platform popular among liberals, and even offered to provide “free consultation for all feds facing the prospect of summary dismissal by Trump,” including for people who worked with former Trump investigator Jack Smith.
The statute that NSC plans to highlight in its lawsuit is the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which became law in 1972. Specifically, the lawsuit alleges that DOGE meets the definition of a “federal advisory committee” and therefore must do things like keep minutes of meetings, have “fairly balanced” representation in their personnel and submit a charter to Congress. DOGE does not appear to have followed these steps to date, according to The Washington Post, which first reported on the NSC lawsuit.
“This is not about sour grapes. This is not people suing because they were not picked. This is people suing because nobody like them was picked, and as a result nobody will be in the room to make sure DOGE understands the critical perspectives they would provide,” NSC Executive Director Kel McClanahan said in a statement shared with the DCNF. “Nobody disputes that there is a huge amount of wasteful spending in the federal government. Our only concern is that DOGE, as it is currently constituted, lacks the expertise to understand how its recommendations will backfire if it pushes federal workers out without understanding why they are there in the first place. Government work is not corporate work, and any recommendations made without that perspective are doomed to fail.”
NSC will file the lawsuit at noon eastern time in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and upload a copy of the filing to its Bluesky account shortly thereafter, McClanahan told the DCNF.
Beyond offering to consult with federal employees who worked with Smith, NSC’s Bluesky account also describes the “Make America Great Again” movement associated with Trump as “what happens if you turned being an abusive parent into a political party” and urged President Joe Biden to pardon Smith and Fauci. Biden ultimately granted preemptive pardons to Fauci and numerous others in one of his final acts as president on Monday.
DOGE has become one of the more popular early Trump administration initiatives aiming to reduce the size and spending of government entities, gaining the support of a number of Congressional Republicans. Musk was selected to run the project along with fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, though several reports have emerged indicating that Ramaswamy may ultimately drop out of his DOGE role to run for governor in Ohio.
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