Democrats fight DOGE with lawsuits since losing the election

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has Democrats furious and the Washington establishment a-boil — desperately trying to mire DOGE’s “break things and move fast” in lawfare and other counterpunching.

But the drive to uncover government waste and projects directly opposed by the public must not stop.

President Trump and his minion Musk need to keep the disruption growing, shining sunlight into dark fiscal corners. 

Friday saw lefty “consumer advocacy” group Public Citizen team up with the University of California student government to sue to stop DOGE from getting Education Department data, citing supposed privacy concerns even though it’s working lawfully through the renamed US Digital Service.

And another lawsuit led by big-gorilla unions — including perennial progressive villain SEIU — has so far stymied DOGE access to Labor Department data.

Members of the same crew, which also includes labor giants the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the American Federation of Government Employees, are suing DOGE over its right to access payment and other information via the US Treasury. 

Federal Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has temporarily and seriously restricted that access, too, but she’s a committed ideologue, most notorious for snickering that a sick and elderly woman she sentenced to years in prison for an abortion-clinic protest might die while locked up (ha, ha?). 

In Boston, another federal judge paused until at least Monday the DOGE-led buyout deadline for federal employees in response to another lawsuit with plaintiffs including AFGE, AFSCME and the National Association of Government Employees.

Then again, about 60,000 of those unions’ members have reportedly already agreed to the buyout: Derailing it puts the unions at odds with those workers’ interests. 

And we’re less than a month into Trump Round 2, so this is merely a preview of coming attractions. 

Will it, as rumored, be the Education Department in the crosshairs next week?

The alphabet-soupniks of SEIU, AFGE, AFSCME and NAGE are not acting in the public interest.

Union leadership realizes that any and all transparency on just how the feds spend taxpayer money is a threat to the easy-street, fiefdom-based lifestyle federal workers enjoy, and a threat to the progressive causes that supposedly justify the comfy arrangements. 

So now they are squealing like pigs and kicking like mules at the thought of being held to the same standards as private-sector workers, and fighting like hell to win in the courts a battle their team lost at the voting booth.

That’s SOP for contemporary Dems, by the way: Lose an election?

Go to court!

DOGE was a big part of Trump’s campaign.

The people have made themselves heard on this one. 

So the lawfare is the ugliest confluence of interests imaginable. 

One designed to protect a privileged class of workers while keeping Americans in the dark about the fact that their hard-earned dollars are being spent in the millions on . . .  Politico subscriptions and pushing DEI in the Third World.

Yes, Team Trump may have taken a baby-with-the-bathwater approach to some cutting, e.g., all but zeroing USAID out. 

Yet the basic impulse is beyond correct: Americans are owed full visibility into all federal spending except the most national-security sensitive. 

And that doesn’t include USAID outlays, no matter how eager the bureaucracy was to classify it.

Musk & Co. may need to refine their approach to prevail in court. 

Indeed, the decisions so far suggest there’ll be more nakedly political jurisprudence against DOGE coming. 

Then again, the lawfare crew gets to pick where it files its initial suits to block DOGE; the legal terrain will be far more friendly when the cases make it to the Supreme Court — setting precedents that will speed up the vast amount of waste-cutting still ahead.

Bottom line: The entire Trump administration must keep holding up the lantern while telling the bureaucratic parasite class to go pound sand until the American people actually know what their government is doing.