Soon after Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization, sued the administration over the questionable conduct of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by billionaire Elon Musk. Over the past eight weeks, Musk and a team of young software engineers have attempted to dismantle or eliminate dozens of federal agencies and fire hundreds of thousands of government workers.
In late January, Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Public Citizen’s co-president, Lisa Gilbert, about the original lawsuit filed against DOGE, and talked with her again this week where she described seven additional lawsuits Public Citizen has filed against the Trump administration.
The issues identified in these new lawsuits include an attempt to stop violations of the Privacy Act at the Department of Education where sensitive student loan information may have been breached by DOGE; an effort to reverse Trump’s dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and a demand to release frozen USAID funds to restart life-saving humanitarian aid programs. Here Gilbert, talks about the lawsuits responding to the Trump regime’s lawlessness and the question of whether or not the U.S. is now in the midst of a constitutional crisis.
[Web editor’s note: The audio interview may omit some portions in the following transcript due to broadcast time constraints.]
LISA GILBERT: Since then, we’ve actually filed seven additional suits, so we’ve been deep in the mix on a host of issues ranging from Privacy Act violations where DOGE is attempting to get our personal information from the Treasury Department database or from the Department of Education – all of our student loan records – and on and on. We’ve sued to try to restart the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; deal with the fact that foreign aid from US AID has been ceased. It’s been just an onslaught of lawlessness from the administration so we’ve been pushing back in every way we can.
MELINDA TUHUS: So, when you said DOGE is trying to get people’s private information, don’t they already have it?
LISA GILBERT: In places where we’ve been able to stop them, no. That is what they want to do, as has been well reported. They wanted to infiltrate this system at the U.S. Treasury Department which holds our Social Security information and Medicare payment information and taxpayer refund information. But we won a temporary restraining order, so that put a halt to direct access for most folks that are associated with DOGE and it’s now proceeding through the courts while we wait to see if we can win the full case. So, not yet is the answer, and we’re very hopeful.
MELINDA TUHUS: Okay, because I have been reading and trying to follow stuff, and I was reading about how the team of 20-somethings had gone in and actually gotten access to that information and that is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. People seem very unwilling to say that right now we are in a constitutional crisis, because Trump/Musk et. al. – they’re defying court rulings – the latest one was a judge told them to bring the planes back from sending Venezuelans to El Salvador to be imprisoned there and they sort of thumbed their noses and laughed about it on social media, and they did not obey. And in terms of the purview of Congress, they’re just cutting things right and left that were already approved by Congress and the money should have gone through. So, are we in a constitutional crisis or not?
LISA GILBERT: That’s a great question. I think we are certainly seeing a slip into that state of being. There will be a moment, I believe, where they clearly defy in a blatant manner, where there is no excuse, where they cannot say the court order was issued verbally when we were already in the air. There will be no excuses, and it will be as blatant and clear as day.
I think there will be a moment when it is obvious and there is nothing else to say. I think in this moment we’re seeing a lot of lawless abuses, but I hesitate to say this is as bad as it’s going to get or that this is a full-throated crisis, if you will, but it’s certainly not good, and we still have a chance to win many of these cases, we still have a chance to fight back, but we are not going in the right direction in terms of the administration’s seriousness and what they’re attempting to do.
MELINDA TUHUS: Right. And I know when he was elected the first time, and he hadn’t already appointed hundreds of judges, we were saying – and it was true – that it was the courts that were saving us. And now he has a lot of his own people who have been appointed judges. Even some of his own people have ruled against his administration, but I guess I’m not as confident that the courts will save us. What do you see as the most important work to do right now?
LISA GILBERT: I think staying the course on a significant number of these cases is incredibly important, because we are moving in the right direction. Take DOGE’s invasion of the Department of Education. The case is proceeding; we are working to block DOGE’s access to financial information of thousands of student loan applicants and their families. It is not over yet, and I think that’s the case with a lot of these cases. The court system isn’t always fast, and I agree that it’s not smart to say that any one remedy will save us. But that said, we are winning in many places. I’m sure you’ve seen the probationary employees that were fired are now being recalled. There are chances to win, and we should just keep fighting.
MELINDA TUHUS: You’re in that world. What do you see as the role of people who aren’t representing cases in court, like just mass movements. Do you think there’s a role for them?
LISA GILBERT: I think there’s a huge role for them. Litigation is a piece of the puzzle, but in no way the whole puzzle. It’s important for people to mobilize and engage. We are getting to critical junctures where that makes a huge difference. We’re in a recess right now, where we should be drawing attention to what happened in Congress last week.
We should be calling out the administration and DOGE for everything they’re doing. There’s a huge day of action on April 5 to do just that. And I think helping to turn the public narrative and the press coverage to deeper understanding of what the administration is doing is a role that regular Americans have a huge part in.
For more information, visit Public Citizen at citizen.org.
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