We Are Officially Beginning the Process to Convene Grand Juries Over DOGE.
Six states allow citizens to convene grand juries via petition. Every official with the authority to act was asked. None acted. Time to grab a clipboard.
In six states, you do not need a prosecutor’s permission to start a criminal investigation. Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Oklahoma allow citizens to convene a criminal grand jury by petition. No district attorney has to agree. No attorney general has to agree. No governor has to agree.
The case those grand juries would examine is already admitted. In a January court filing, the federal government acknowledged that DOGE employees at the Social Security Administration moved agency data to an unauthorized server the agency cannot audit, sent an encrypted file of roughly 1,000 people’s names and addresses to other agencies in a format the SSA cannot open, and signed an agreement with a political group seeking to match SSA records against state voter rolls. Every state makes identity theft a crime, and the crime is the act itself, knowingly obtaining, possessing, or transferring another person’s identifying information without authorization and with wrongful intent; no one has to prove a specific account was later misused. And these cases can be filed where the victims live: Kansas, Nebraska, and New Mexico expressly place the crime in the county where the victim resides, regardless of where the perpetrator sat. The SSA holds records on virtually everyone with a Social Security number, and the agency has told a federal court it cannot determine whose data was taken. Finding that out is what grand juries are for.
The signature requirements are reachable in most of these states. In Kansas, a woman named Madison Smith needed 212 signatures to force a grand jury in her county; she collected 329, and the grand jury was convened.
Oklahoma requires 100 signatures plus 2 percent of the county’s vote in the last governor’s race, with a floor of 500 and a ceiling of 5,000. New Mexico requires the greater of 200 signatures or 2 percent of the county’s registered voters.
In most counties, that is a number a determined group of neighbors with clipboards can gather, and in the largest counties it is a few thousand. Nevada is the exception: its petition requires signatures equal to 25 percent of the county’s turnout in the last general election, a far higher requirement than the other five states.
The process has the same structure everywhere: a written petition alleging specific crimes, signatures from registered voters in your county, certification by the clerk, and a judge who must then act.
In Oklahoma, the petition is filed with the court clerk before any signatures are gathered. A judge reviews it within four days and, if it is deficient, states every deficiency in writing, with two days to amend. Once it is approved, circulators have forty-five days to collect the signatures, and once the election board certifies them, the judge must impanel the grand jury within thirty days.
In Kansas, the person who filed the petition testifies to the grand jury first, and the jury can hire its own special counsel and investigators with the court’s approval, instead of or in addition to the local prosecutor. From there the grand jury does what grand juries do: it subpoenas witnesses and records, and it decides whether to indict.
That power is not theoretical. Citizen-petitioned grand juries in Kansas have subpoenaed thousands of records and returned indictments, and the court enforces a grand jury’s subpoenas with compulsory process.
The subpoena power does not end at the state line, either. Under the Uniform Act to Secure the Attendance of Witnesses, adopted in every state and sustained by the Supreme Court, a court where a grand jury investigation has commenced can certify that a person in another state is a material witness, and that person’s home-state courts can summon them to appear, with refusal punishable as if they had defied a subpoena at home. That is the process by which the engineers who moved the data, and the leadership they answered to, can be required to answer questions under oath in a county courthouse, before a jury of ordinary citizens. They will fight it, and some fights will be lost, but a subpoena fought in public is still a public record of who fought it. And if the jury finds the evidence warrants charges, it returns an indictment, a state indictment, which no presidential pardon can reach.
For six months, The Existentialist Republic has given readers the tools to act on this at every level that has authority: hundreds of police reports filed, and letters, emails, and phone calls to county prosecutors and attorneys general in all fifty states, asking them to investigate the DOGE employees who mishandled the Social Security records of hundreds of millions of Americans, conduct the federal government has admitted in court.
Not one of those officials has publicly signaled a willingness to act, despite the conduct affecting their own residents and despite possessing the legal authority to do so. Many of the answers repeat two refusals: that it is a federal matter, which the venue laws say it is not, and that civil lawsuits are underway, which cannot convict anyone.
Every official with the power to start this has now been asked. The petition is the next step, and it is the one way to start criminal process that does not require any official’s permission, which makes it the one way a refusing official cannot refuse.
One caution. Courts quash defective petitions. In 2022, the New Mexico Supreme Court invalidated petitions seeking a grand jury to investigate the governor over her COVID orders. A petition has to allege specific crimes, not general grievances. This record supplies them: state identity theft and computer crime statutes, venue where the victims live, and a Justice Department court filing admitting the conduct. Our article on the DOGE prosecutions explains all of it.
Pennsylvania has a related mechanism. Rule 506 lets any citizen submit a private criminal complaint, which the district attorney must approve or disapprove with written reasons, reviewable by the Court of Common Pleas and public under the Right-to-Know Law. It does not bypass the prosecutor, but it converts a refusal into a signed public document.
We are beginning that process now. If you live in Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, or Oklahoma, comment below or send us a direct message with your state and county, and we will invite you to the organizing group for your state.
We are building a toolkit for each state: the signature number for your county, the filing rules and deadlines, and a petition template drafted to that state’s requirements and based only on the court-admitted record. Your comments and messages tell us which states to prepare first. We will publish each state’s materials as they are ready, and as petitions advance, we will gather and share the resources filers need at each step.
If you are in Pennsylvania and want the Rule 506 private complaint materials, the same applies. A petition has been certified before by ordinary people who decided to do it. There is no reason yours cannot be next.
Do you want to help all this happen? It’s all funded through subscribers, our Buy Me A Coffee page, and our store. They’re all linked below. If you can chip in, you’re making this all real for the folks who will be gathering signatures, drafting and filing paperwork, and eventually getting some serious consequences delivered to Musk, Big Balls, or any other DOGE member who committed a crime. Let’s make some justice.
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please continue to be relentless in this work! Your work, understanding of law, and inspiring words to those with open ears are invaluable! Wish WI was a state that had this, but anything that will result in VISIBILITY, CONSEQUENCES, and RESULTS could provide some momentum and ACCOUNTABILITY !
You and your IQ of 250 started this! (Fortunately, lol.) I just saw an opinion recently that the only way forward is state action. We keep calling, writing and showing up. So many thanks, as always.😊