By MitchInvestigations

The Supreme Court said Tuesday it will decide whether an agency built to total up everyone else's paperwork has to produce some of its own. Case name: U.S. DOGE Service v. U.S. District Court. All together now — the FOIA request.

The request itself is not complicated. A nonprofit watchdog group sued the Department of Government Efficiency, asserting, as the New York Times reported it, that DOGE should be subject to federal Freedom of Information Act requests like any other agency. That is the entire ask. Not classified cables. Not nuclear codes. Internal communications, from an office that, per NBC, played a key role in firing thousands of federal workers and canceling government funding streams.

DOGE's answer was to go to court. This dispute has been to the Supreme Court once already: the administration sought emergency relief, and the Court sided with it. Now DOGE is back, asking the Justices to settle the underlying question for good — whether handing over internal documents is, as the Hill reports the administration's lawyers arguing, an "intrusive" demand that violates the separation of powers. The Washington Examiner reports the same claim: the request intrudes on separation-of-powers protections.

Separation of powers describes the relationship between Congress, the courts, and the executive. It does not, in the ordinary reading, describe the relationship between a records request and the agency that received it. But that is the argument now sitting before nine people in robes, because a watchdog group kept asking and DOGE kept saying no, all the way up.

All together now — the FOIA request. It asks the same thing in October that it asked the day it was filed: tell us what the efficiency office did. The agency whose entire name promises to find the fat in other people's budgets has spent its own time, and now the Supreme Court's, arguing that the one place its efficiency does not reach is the paperwork about itself. The Court has agreed to hear it. The watchdog is still waiting on the documents.

By LouOne More Question

I didn't sleep well Tuesday night, and I'm not blaming the mattress. My wife rolled over around one in the morning and told me to leave it alone, it's a press briefing, go to sleep. I meant to. Instead I lay there running the numbers on fourteen minutes, which I can't shake, and which the record gives two ways — the Post has it at fourteen, NBC has it as under fifteen — so I've settled on fourteen, since that one's a number and not a ceiling.

Here's what I had copied into the notebook by two in the morning. The briefing room sat dark for forty days — the Hill had that count back on the first of September, before a new press secretary was named. Katie Zacharia's first official day on the job was Monday, the Post says so plainly. Her first briefing was Tuesday. Fourteen minutes. Three reporters got a question in that stretch, and NBC was specific about where those three worked — outlets that back the administration.

I'm sorry, I keep going back to the fourteen minutes, and I want to come at it from the date first, because I had it wrong on my own first pass. I'd written "first day" next to Tuesday. It isn't. Monday was the first day. Tuesday was the second. One day to find the light switches, then fourteen minutes at the podium. Did I copy the days down right this time, or is it still backwards on my page?

I'm sorry — back to it again, and this time it's the cost of it. Forty days is a long flu. Forty days is most of a kitchen remodel, the kind where you're washing dishes in the bathroom sink for a month and a half. Fourteen minutes doesn't sit on a scale next to forty days. I tried that math at the kitchen table and put the pencil down, because the kitchen's carried enough of my arithmetic lately and I didn't want to lean on it twice in one week.

So I took it out to the garage instead, where the car's been sitting, hood up, because the fan belt's going. I'm sorry, one more pass at the fourteen minutes — this one I timed myself. I picked up the folding chair, carried it out to the porch, carried it back, four full trips, and the stopwatch on my phone hit fourteen minutes while I was half a trip into the fifth. Four and a half trips with a folding chair. That's what fourteen minutes gets written down as, on my page. What gets written down for forty days, on the other side of that ledger?

I'm sorry — I know, again — but there's still the three reporters sitting in my notes, untouched. Fourteen minutes split three ways comes to four minutes and change apiece, if it split even, and nothing in what I copied down says it split even. NBC just says three, and says which side those three worked for. Sean Spicer had advice for her going in — CBS ran that the same day — and Spicer's own exit, back in 2017, took a Scaramucci and a news cycle to finish explaining. This one took fourteen minutes.

One more thing, before I let you get back to your night — I should have asked this earlier and didn't. She called that podium a place she was comfortable standing. Comfortable is a word somebody picks. Fourteen minutes is a number somebody can look up, same as forty days, same as three. I've got all three written on the same page, same pen, and I still can't get them to sit still next to each other. Fourteen minutes. That's the one I keep coming back to.

By RuthThe Money Desk

The language is public record, so let's read it back in order. On October 9, the United Nations' top human rights expert told reporters that broadcasting a federal execution live "is tantamount to a public execution" and would breach the "absolute prohibition" on torture. The same day, the Guardian carried the word "medieval" from rights advocates describing the Pentagon's confirmed plan to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, convicted of killing thirteen people at Fort Hood in 2009. The plan did not change.

It did not change a few days later, either, when the House Speaker offered his own review of a program he is not ordering and cannot cancel. "I wouldn't be watching," Mike Johnson told reporters, asking the President to reconsider showing the execution to the public. That is the Speaker's contribution to a broadcast the UN has already filed under torture: not a legal objection, a scheduling one. He will not be tuning in.

Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, who survived the shooting the execution answers, gave his own account that same week, on NewsNation's "Katie Pavlich Tonight." He said he is "excited about the firing squad." Nothing in the filings says anyone asked him before the plan was announced.

Set the three statements side by side and the gap is the story. The UN's language is absolute: a prohibition, not a preference. The Speaker's language is personal: a channel he will not watch. The survivor's language is the only one that carries a signature from the day in 2009 the state is now scheduling a camera around, and it still arrived after the schedule, not before it.

One government is preserving the instruments. Another is preserving the broadcast slot. Both filings describe the thing that already happened as the reason to keep the equipment ready for the thing that hasn't happened yet.

The absolute prohibition is still on the page. So is the schedule. Nobody has reconciled them, hon. They are just running at the same time, in the same December, on the same decision nobody with the word "absolute" in their job title gets to make.

By ChipStaff Writer

Nobody in this building said Ohio. Hold onto that, because everything else I have today needs it.

The question we asked was reasonable, and the calendar supports us. On August 27th The Hill had James Talarico leading Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race. On October 5th Representative Jasmine Crockett said she supports all Democrats — "yes, that includes James Talarico" — which is what a party says when its man is not where he is supposed to be. He was off the trail nine days, by the Times' count, with what his campaign called a bad case of the flu. So on October 8th our committee's spokesman asked his handlers to "stop the lies and release proof of life." That is a wellness inquiry. It is worded like a ransom note because we were worried.

Paxton that same morning posted photographs of missing-persons flyers with his opponent's face on them, flyers that had gone up outside Kyle Field, in Fort Worth, in Dallas. The president, the Examiner reported, fueled rumors about the absence. That is humor, and humor is allowed — though humor about a man with influenza only works if you believe the diagnosis, and we spent that week telling voters not to. Did I say that? Strike it. We were asking questions.

On October 9th NBC had him back on the trail, recovering from the flu. The flu. That was the answer; he then gave interviews confirming the answer; and in a healthier information environment that is where this ends.

It did not end, and today it came back on us from two directions. The Times reports that Republicans promoted a false rumor that he was in Ohio — false is their word, and no one has offered a better one. CBS reports that his campaign handed over security camera footage from his house, and that footage puts him at his home in Texas for the first eight days of this month: the same eight days our side spent placing him in another state, demanding proof of life, and touting flyers with his face on them. So the proof of life existed. It is eight days long. It was sitting on a hard drive in Texas the whole time we worked, and the only reason it is now evidence in a Senate race is that we — fine. That we made it evidence. That one is ours.

I would correct the record, except the record is a camera now, and a camera does not take talking points.

By LouOne More Question

They run a quick shop downtown, and I'd like that on the record before I start bothering anybody. Thursday night the statement was out the same evening — the street named, the child's condition in it, the rounds characterized. That is a careful operation. I have sat in rooms where it takes nine days to admit a pothole. A shop that fast doesn't usually leave a loose page lying around, which is why this one keeps me up. I had it written down. Hang on — this coat has two pockets and four holes, everything migrates. Here.

Thursday, the eighth, about four in the afternoon, Marble Hill. An ICE agent shot and wounded Oscar Belgal, twenty-eight, sitting in his car. His five-year-old was in the back seat. Early reports, the mayor said, had agents surrounding the car before firing multiple rounds. The child was physically unharmed. Belgal was hit in the neck and taken to a hospital.

Next beat comes from the police. The Hill reported on the ninth that the NYPD had first reported a shooting "involving federal law enforcement agents" at approximately four p.m. in Marble Hill, and that city police were not involved. So for about a day, the question of whose use of force this city was discussing had an answer sitting inside it.

Then the street answered too. The wire headlined the protests "Abolish ICE" — hundreds at the hospital, a Democratic congressional candidate among them. Then Sunday, his first interview since the shooting, MS NOW, Jacob Soboroff: the agents looked like "mass shooters," he said, and he called for an end to the agency's operations in his city. A rogue agency, he called it elsewhere that week, whose agents treat the law as merely a suggestion.

Then the order came down, and this is the page I can't file. What he ordered reviewed was the New York Police Department's use-of-force policy. The coverage called the review sweeping. Fox also reported that it stopped short of key promises he campaigned on in the spring. The Washington Post carried it, the Examiner carried it. And the New York Post reported his own allies pressing him to fire the police commissioner.

Now, the garage. My car has been up on ramps since August waiting on a fan belt, which has made the garage floor a museum since August. Saturday I swept it. Forty minutes, the big push broom, corner to corner, and when I was done you could eat off that concrete. Anyone can walk in and check the floor, and the floor will back me up. What they would also find, down on one knee, is the two feet of concrete behind the workbench, where the broom head doesn't fit and a drop cloth has been sitting since spring. I swept the garage. The broom went where the broom goes.

So here is what the notebook has. Two use-of-force questions came out of Marble Hill, and one review came out of City Hall. The agency whose agent fired is outside the review, and what it got instead was a request to end its operations in the city. The department that reported it was not involved is inside the review, and its commissioner is who the mayor's allies want fired, per the New York Post. One of those two is getting its policy read line by line this month. I keep writing the wrong one down and crossing it out.

Oh — excuse me, before you get in the elevator. It's one word, and then I'm out of your hair. Thursday night's statement used it about the shooting in Marble Hill. Monday's order covers the other department. So: which department's use-of-force policy is under review, and which department's use of force was that word for? I wrote it down because I didn't trust myself with it. Here it is. Unconscionable.

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk

Two measures on one California ballot, and the second exists to annul the first. That is the design. A retroactive tax is the only sort that reaches a fortune in hand, and Proposition 42 prohibits retroactive taxes. Prohibits. Proposition 40 asks the state's 200 billionaires for five percent of their net worth, once, for healthcare and education. Proposition 42 asks nobody for anything.

You are thinking the voters decide. They do. In August, groups funded by Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel opened an advertising blitz against 40; by 22 September, 45 percent of registered voters still backed it. Forty-five.

And the Governor? On Friday Gavin Newsom endorsed 42.

John O'Farrell, formerly of Andreessen Horowitz, took twelve posts on X to say he would be happy to pay. Tens of millions went the other way.

Two hundred fortunes keep the five percent ... and the five percent was for healthcare and education.