The Supreme Court has given President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency two temporary wins, ruling DOGE members can access Social Security information that challengers had hoped to block, and temporarily stopping a liberal advocacy group from obtaining records of DOGE’s operations.
The high court on Friday halted an order from a judge in Maryland restricting the team’s access to the Social Security Administration under federal privacy laws.
“We conclude that, under the present circumstances, SSA may proceed to afford members of the SSA DOGE Team access to the agency records in question in order for those members to do their work,” the court said in an unsigned order.
The agency holds sensitive data on nearly everyone in the country, including school records, salary details and medical information.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the court’s action creates “grave privacy risks” for millions of Americans by giving “unfettered data access to DOGE regardless — despite its failure to show any need or any interest in complying with existing privacy safeguards, and all before we know for sure whether federal law countenances such access.”
“But, once again, this Court dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them,” she wrote.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined Justice Jackson’s opinion, and Justice Elena Kagan said she also would have ruled against the administration.
The Trump administration says DOGE needs access to carry out its mission of targeting waste and fraud in the federal government.
The court also granted a request to halt a lower court order green-lighting discovery of certain material from DOGE through the Freedom of Information Act. That information was sought by the left-leaning advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
The high court sent the issue back to the lower court to narrow the discovery order, as the Trump administration has argued DOGE is not subject to FOIA requests.
President Trump created DOGE through executive order. It was led until last week by billionaire Elon Musk, who has suggested the Social Security Administration is rife with fraud.
Though in recent days, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have had a falling out and Mr. Musk has departed his work overseeing DOGE.
The lawsuit regarding the Social Security Administration was brought by labor unions, retirees and an advocacy group, which argued the access to the data threatens privacy rights and could lead to personal information ending up in the hands of bad actors.
The government had argued no data was improperly shared and that the DOGE team were government employees.
Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander, a federal district judge in Maryland, had said that the federal government “does not appear to share a privacy concern for the millions of Americans whose SSA records were made available to the DOGE affiliates, without their consent, and which contain sensitive, confidential, and personally identifiable information.”
The Obama appointee said that there are privacy concerns with the DOGE team accessing the SSA records, and that the move likely runs afoul of federal law.
DOGE, since its creation, has drawn roughly two dozen legal challenges, according to The Associated Press.
In the discovery dispute, CREW had sought documents and depositions to assess whether DOGE is a government agency subject to the Freedom of Information Act. The Trump administration has fought the FOIA requests.
• This story is based in part on wire service reports.
