The plaintiffs said DOGE is breaking federal laws and that recent executive orders on DEI and transgender ideology are unconstitutional.
Two lawsuits were filed on Feb. 20 against the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and President Donald Trump’s executive orders that curb the government’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and disavow transgender ideology.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) v. U.S. DOGE Service was filed at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
CREW asked the court to compel DOGE to comply with federal disclosure and records laws.
The other lawsuit, San Francisco AIDS Foundation v. Trump, was filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The plaintiffs said that three of Trump’s recent executive orders related to DEI policies are unconstitutional and asked the court to block them.
In CREW’s lawsuit, the defendants are DOGE, Elon Musk, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the National Archives and Records Administration.
Trump issued Executive Order 14158 on Jan. 20 implementing DOGE, an advisory body that recommends cost-cutting measures. The order reorganized the U.S. Digital Service—which President Barack Obama created in 2014 within the Executive Office of the President—as the U.S. DOGE Service, according to a Congressional Research Service report.
The order directed the entity to “implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
Federal government officials have recently given differing accounts of Musk’s status at DOGE.
The White House has previously referred to Musk, a tech entrepreneur, as a special government employee. The designation allows him to work for the federal government and potentially avoid disclosure rules regarding possible conflicts of interest and finances that generally apply to other government workers.
White House official Joshua Fisher said in a court filing on Feb. 17 that Musk does not work for DOGE and has no decision-making authority.
Both DOGE and a subunit of DOGE are separate from the White House Office, which employs Musk as a special government employee and senior adviser to the president, Fisher said.
On Feb. 19, Trump said at an event in Miami that Musk runs DOGE.
“I signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency and put a man named Elon Musk in charge,” the president said. Trump has often referred to Musk as the functional leader of DOGE.
CREW said in its legal complaint that even though Musk wrote in a November 2024 post on social media platform X that “all actions of the Department of Government Efficiency will be posted online for maximum transparency,” DOGE has failed to live up to that promise.
DOGE “has worked in the shadows—a cadre of largely unidentified actors, whose status as government employees is unclear, controlling major government functions with no oversight,” the complaint states.
“[DOGE] has provided no meaningful transparency into its operations or assurances that it is maintaining proper records of its unprecedented and legally dubious work.”
Despite not being authorized by statute, DOGE “wields shockingly broad power over all manner of federal functions—far exceeding its limited legal authority,” CREW alleged.
The complaint said DOGE exercises varying degrees of control over federal contracts, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Treasury Department.
It also alleges DOGE has violated the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the Federal Records Act by failing to disclose records and preserve records, despite requests by CREW.
“The American people have a right to know how [DOGE] is managing (or mismanaging) their tax dollars and their data, how it is exercising its authority to influence government operations, whether conflicts of interest in [DOGE] leadership are impacting its work, and the extent to which it is operating outside of its slim legal mandate,” it states.
CREW asked the court to require DOGE to comply with its FOIA disclosure requests and preserve its records.
Trump told reporters on Feb. 18. that he would not allow “any conflict of interest” related to Musk’s work.
He said later: “I told Elon, any conflicts, you can’t have anything to do with that. So, anything to do with possibly even space, we won’t let Elon partake in that.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters earlier in February, “If Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, then Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.”
Musk said during an appearance on Fox News on Tuesday, “I’ll recuse myself if it is a conflict.”
The lawsuit brought by the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and eight other organizations, most of which deliver health care and social services to the LGBT community, targets Executive Orders 14151, 14168, and 14173. All nine of the plaintiffs receive federal funding.
The defendants are Trump, who is being sued in his official capacity as president, along with the departments of Justice, Labor, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development, and other federal agencies including the OMB and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Trump’s Executive Order 14151 instructs the OMB and the Department of Justice to “coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs,” including “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”
President Joe Biden used the DEIA acronym in Executive Order 14035 signed on June 25, 2021, which required each federal agency to appoint a chief diversity officer or a diversity and inclusion officer. Accessibility in this context means “federal workspaces must be fully accessible to employees with disabilities,” according to the Access Board’s website.
The Office of Personnel Management was tasked with creating a plan for implementing DEIA across the agencies, the Congressional Research Service reported in June 2024. Trump rescinded Executive Order 14035 when he signed Executive Order 14148 on Jan. 20.
Trump’s Executive Order 14168 states that it is government policy going forward to recognize “two sexes, male and female,” and rejects “the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex.”
Trump’s Executive Order 14173 targets “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) or ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) that can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation.”
The legal complaint states that the three executive orders “seek to punish and defund Plaintiffs for acknowledging the existence of transgender people, advocating for their rights, and adopting an equitable approach to the provision of their services that recognizes the rich diversity of the United States.”
Executive Order 14168 offers “a disparaging, demeaning, idiosyncratic, and unscientific viewpoint about transgender people and gender identity” and excludes them from “government recognition and protection,” the complaint states.
The three executive orders expose the plaintiffs and those they serve to “opprobrium and exclusion from services that receive federal financial assistance because of who they are,” and “pose an existential threat to transgender people and the organizations that respect their existence,” the complaint said.
The Epoch Times contacted the Department of Justice, which is representing the defendants in both lawsuits, for comment but received no reply by publication time.
Zachary Stieber and Jack Phillips contributed to this report.