Judge Rejects Emergency Bid to Compel Musk-Related FCC FOIA Release
However, the Court Order calls for faster document production on Musk’s DOGE program.
WASHINGTON, August 27, 2025 – A federal judge has ordered the Federal Communications Commission to accelerate the release of records that could reveal whether Elon Musk’s hand-picked “efficiency” aides at the agency gained access to information potentially advantageous to his SpaceX and Starlink ventures.
In February, Frequency Forward, an advocacy group that pushes for transparency and accountability at the FCC, and journalist Nina Burleigh, who covered the Clinton White House for Time magazine, sued the FCC in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia under the Freedom of Information Act.
The plaintiffs requested that the FCC turn over records detailing communications between Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) staff and FCC employees. The plaintiffs suspected that DOGE staffers at the FCC had roles and access that raised questions about conflicts of interest given Musk’s extensive business interests in areas regulated by the FCC, namely SpaceX and Starlink.
“As the head of DOGE, Musk has taken on the role of a federal regulator. At the FCC he has the potential to unlawfully influence regulatory decisions affecting his own company SpaceX/Starlink,” Burleigh’s complaint said. Musk is no longer running DOGE.
After months of back and forth between the FCC and the plaintiff, the Court issued an order on July 2 mandating that the FCC disclose the documents at issue. On August 13, the FCC produced 35 pages of records, which the plaintiffs argued “failed to provide even the most easily accessible records, such as the resumes of DOGE employees. These types of records involve
almost no administrative burden and are regularly produced by Federal agencies within weeks of a FOIA request. The records the FCC has produced to date are incomplete and intentionally misleading.”
On Monday, the plaintiffs filed a motion for preliminary injunction – an emergency order requiring the FCC to immediately turn over the documents. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson denied the preliminary injunction, arguing in her Order that such a measure is an “extraordinary remedy” and requires proof of irreparable harm.
“They have failed to identify any injury arising out of the lack of access to the requested records that is sufficiently certain and imminent that it could not be remediated by the production of the documents they seek in due course in this litigation,” Jackson’s Order states.
However, noting that the “plaintiffs’ consternation with the course of events since the lawsuit was filed is not wholly misplaced,” Jackson agreed that the FCC’s July 23, 2025 status report was “vague and uninformative.” The Order pushed the FCC to speed up its FOIA response, setting hard deadlines of Sept.15, 2025 and Oct. 6, 2025 for rolling document releases.
Furthermore, the Order mandated that the FCC file a status report with a proposed schedule for completing production by Oct.13, 2025.
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