DOGE Cuts Off Government PACER Access Because They Are The Dumbest People On The Planet
They have no idea how lawyering works. The post DOGE Cuts Off Government PACER Access Because They Are The Dumbest People On The Planet appeared first on Above the Law.
Elon Musk and his “CoD waiting room-cum-audit team” continue their clumsy speedrun through the federal government. Each day brings another comical cockup from DOGE’s teenaged staff, from firing all the people in charge of nuclear weapons to casually spawning a whole army of foreign intelligence assets.
A couple of weeks ago, the DOGE team proudly-yet-accidentally canceled the SEC’s Westlaw subscription while trying to punish Reuters—never bothering to check if they were even the same thing, let alone realizing that Westlaw access is, you know, kind of essential for the SEC’s job.
Crackerjack work, guys!
While chaste by virtue of women with self-respect, the DOGE team was unchastened by the SEC experience and followed up by cutting off government access to another essential legal resource:
This is extra funny given that, unlike a privately owned tool Westlaw, this effort to reduce government spending was immediately offset because PACER is a government revenue stream.
PACER should be free, of course. It’s a slush fund for the judiciary and we’ve already tried to make it free in the past to no avail. But for now it does cost and the Treasury needs access to it in order to run the various cases it’s involved in, lest it ends up costing the government even more money. Something that, until last week, was so obvious that no one even thought to question.
And that’s what makes DOGE the biggest legal technology story going right now. The infrastructure of legal research, access to case law, and the basic mechanics of litigation are increasingly wrapped up in digital tools. The “Dunning-Kruger Office of Government Efficiency” doesn’t understand legal technology and they don’t even realize they don’t understand it. To them, Westlaw and PACER are just line items to slash. Next it’ll be the eDiscovery platform or the contract review system. And then — like the looming cancellation of Verizon’s FAA contract to be replaced by Musk’s Starlink — switched out for some shoddily constructed Musk product promising to do the job just as well because he fed it “all court cases.” Then Trump will decide Bill Gates insulted him in 1996 and the government loses all of Microsoft’s legal tools.
And when the government ceases to have functional lawyering products, it impacts the whole industry.
Earlier: Elon Musk’s DOGE Can’t Even Secure A Website, Let Alone The Government
Trump Cancels The SEC’s Westlaw Subscription For Probably The Dumbest Possible Reason
Elon Musk Feeds AI ‘All Court Cases,’ Promises It Will Replace Judges Because He’s An Idiot
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
The post DOGE Cuts Off Government PACER Access Because They Are The Dumbest People On The Planet appeared first on Above the Law.
