In the Press

The Trump administration faces a slew of lawsuits challenging budget freezes across the federal government. But the actions at issue in this suit are different, according to Orion Danjuma, counsel at Protect Democracy, because the administration’s letter to the university represents a “ransom note” demanding “key changes about the way it operates.”

Mr. Danjuma added that he was not aware of other instances of the government canceling grants to force policy changes at a private institution.

“That is all new, and the damage is quite severe,” he said.

“You cannot and should not be playing loose with the American public’s private and confidential information,” said Nicole Schneidman, a technology policy strategist with the anti-authoritarian group Protect Democracy.

Protect Democracy filed a lawsuit alleging that DOGE’s access to some of this data violates a federal law preventing Americans’ data from being collected without their consent. A federal judge temporarily blocked DOGE from sensitive information at the Department of Education and other agencies.

He’s [Elon Musk] using a scorched-earth strategy not unlike how he turned Twitter upside-down when he bought it, said Nicole Schneidman, a technology policy strategist with the anti-authoritarian group Protect Democracy. When Musk took over Twitter, he scrubbed the staff down to the bare minimum, and employees were even locked out of office buildings. Last week, USAID employees were similarly locked out.

“This is a playbook that Musk has run before,” Schneidman said. “It was a playbook that had dire ramifications in the context of Twitter. It lost an estimated 72 percent of its value from what Musk paid for it. Is that the fate that we are comfortable with for our federal government?”

“Spending as much money as the Escambia County School Board has so far to defend the indefensible — removing school library books about LGBTQ and Black characters — is unfortunate, especially since those resources could instead be spent on reviewing these books, many of which have been off school library shelves for over two years now,” said Shalini Goel Agarwal, special counsel for Protect Democracy, in a statement. Her group is representing the plaintiffs.

The legal nonprofit Protect Democracy helped file a number of defamation lawsuits against election deniers after the 2020 election, “on behalf of people who found themselves suddenly being lied about in the public sphere for claims that they were breaking the law when they were not breaking the law,” said Protect Democracy counsel Jane Bentrott.