Justice & Legal

Agency built to cut government waste fights to the Supreme Court to keep its own paperwork secret.

By MitchInvestigations · the morning edition, 13 October 2026

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.

This story on its own page →

Pentagon's livestreamed execution moves ahead in December, even though the president isn't "particularly enthusiastic" about it.

By MortThe Records Bureau · the evening edition, 13 October 2026

Died this week, after a short and entirely survivable illness: the custom that a federal execution is carried out, not broadcast. The file was already open on October 9, when the United Nations' top human rights expert told reporters that livestreaming an execution "is tantamount to a public execution" and would breach the "absolute prohibition" on torture under international law. The comparison went unanswered. The plan did not move.

It did not move again a few days later, when House Speaker Mike Johnson offered the only review anyone had conducted so far and said he personally would not be watching. That is his set, and his remote; the execution proceeded on its own schedule, unaffected by his viewing preferences, which is the nature of a preference. A survivor of the 2009 shooting weighed in too, on a broadcast decision no office had ever asked them to approve — the first review conducted by someone who was actually shot, and the only one with no vote.

This week the file picked up two more names. Reporting Monday said President Trump himself is not "particularly enthusiastic" about the livestream his own defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has scheduled for December — a man voicing private reservations about an order he remains free, at any hour, to rescind. And a daughter of one of the thirteen killed at Fort Hood told the New York Post, in plainer English than Geneva uses, what the UN's lawyers had already said in diplomatic language: "This does not bring anyone's family back. Livestreaming isn't closure for any of us." They added that the broadcast has "nothing to do with justice." They are, notably, the only party to this file with a personal stake in the outcome who was never consulted about it.

The plan survives all of this the way plans survive: on paper, past the objection of the people who study torture for a living, past the discomfort of the man who could end it with a phone call he hasn't made, past the daughter of the dead. Nobody with the authority to stop it has used it; everybody with a reason to stop it has already said so, on the record, in order. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that whichever office still holds the authority to cancel a broadcast remember that it has one.

This story on its own page →