The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to review the Trump administration’s latest plea for help against a watchdog group that has been fighting for information about the Elon Musk-backed Department of Government Efficiency.

The case will be argued later this term with a ruling expected by July. The announcement that the court will hear the case appeared on an order list along with other action on pending petitions.

In a statement Tuesday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s chief counsel Nikhel Sus said, “The lower courts have uniformly ruled that CREW is entitled to discovery in this case to help the court determine whether DOGE wields the type of authority that would make it subject to” the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, which the administration has argued DOGE isn’t subject to.

“We will continue to pursue transparency for the American people, who deserve to know the details of the Trump administration’s efforts to unilaterally remake the federal government,” Sus said.

It takes four justices to agree to review an appeal. The vote tally isn’t public, but the court’s GOP-appointed majority backed the administration in a previous round of litigation. Last year, the majority told the appeals court in Washington, D.C., to narrow a discovery order into DOGE communications. After further litigation, the administration returned to the justices for additional assistance, leading to Tuesday’s announcement that the justices will consider the matter further.

“The court of appeals has continued to approve intrusive discovery against a presidential advisory body without adequate consideration for the separation of powers, the FOIA statute, and this Court’s previous order,” the Justice Department wrote in its petition for Supreme Court review.

The DOJ raised two legal questions it said warranted consideration from the justices: 1) whether the appeals court departed from last year’s Supreme Court instructions; and 2) whether a court can order broad discovery into an executive advisory body to determine if FOIA applies to that entity in the first place.

CREW urged the justices to let stand the latest order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. On the first question, CREW said the D.C. Circuit followed the high court’s instructions. On the second question, it said the legal issue isn’t a pressing one and that “it would be highly problematic to radically reshape the law regarding when FOIA applies” in this situation.

The watchdog group also said the government’s interest in blocking discovery into the purported efficiency initiative is lower now than it was earlier in President Donald Trump’s second term. At this point, CREW said, there’s “no appreciable risk that further litigation will prevent a recently inaugurated President from achieving his agenda. The discovery, moreover, represents a targeted backward-looking inquiry into DOGE’s past operations.”

CREW noted that after the Supreme Court’s narrowing order last year, the group withdrew all its discovery requests regarding recommendations made by U.S. Doge Service employees and others. That left CREW seeking discovery on the entity’s structure, its directives to cancel contracts and fire workers, and specific examples of it exercising “substantial independent authority” that would make FOIA apply.

Laying out the factual background in its opposition filing, CREW recounted that the U.S. Doge Service made “massive changes across the federal government” — including Musk’s announcement of the termination of contracts “worth billions of dollars” and DOGE’s “unprecedented access to sensitive personal and classified data and payment systems.”

In its final reply brief to the justices, the DOJ said CREW had downplayed the importance of the legal issue generally and in this case specifically. “Most discovery is inherently backward-looking,” it said, “yet discovery into sensitive interbranch communications risks chilling future communications by presidential advisors who will have to fear having their advice disclosed in litigation.”

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