U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of Maryland said Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was intruding into “the personal affairs of millions of Americans” as part of its hunt for fraud and waste under President Donald Trump.
The case has shed light for the first time on the amount of personal information DOGE staffers have been given access to in the databases, which hold vast amounts of sensitive data on most Americans.
Hollander said at the heart of the case was a decision by new leadership at the SSA to give 10 DOGE staffers unfettered access to the records of millions of Americans. She said lawyers for SSA had acknowledged that agency leaders had given DOGE access to a “massive amount” of records.
'CROWN JEWELS'
Thursday's ruling is one of the most significant legal setbacks for DOGE to date. It comes two days after a federal judge ruled Musk's efforts to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development were likely illegal because he is not a Senate-confirmed cabinet official.
A White House spokesman criticized the decision in a statement and said Trump will “continue to seek all legal remedies available to ensure the will of the American people goes into effect.”
Judges have declined to block DOGE from accessing computer systems at the departments of Labor, Health and Humans Services, Energy and others, although the team has been barred from accessing sensitive Treasury Department payment systems.
The advocacy group Democracy Forward said the ruling was an important win for data privacy.
RECORDS TO THE 1930s
Two of the former SSA officials told Reuters the names of millions of dead people are inside the main database because it contains records dating back to the agency's founding in the 1930s. But the fact they are listed in the systems does not mean they receive payments, the officials said.
In a statement on March 3, the SSA said it had identified over $800 million in cost savings for the 2025 fiscal year.
The information in SSA's records includes Social Security numbers, personal medical and mental health records, driver's license information, bank account data, tax information, earnings history, birth and marriage records, and employment and employer records, Judge Hollander said.
“(The) defense 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 judge said.
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