CNN
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A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Social Security Administration from giving members of the Department of Government Efficiency access to agency data containing individuals’ personally identifiable information.
In a scathing 137-page opinion, US District Judge Judge Ellen Hollander said that the administration had failed to show why representatives of the Elon Musk-led initiative had a “need” for such “broad access to millions of Americans’ sensitive” personal information, as required under the relevant law.
“The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,” Hollander wrote. “It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.”
Her new temporary restraining order also requires DOGE affiliates to delete any personally identifiable information data they’ve acquired from the agency, and she has ordered them to remove any software they’ve installed in SSA systems. Her order, however, allows the DOGE affiliates to access Social Security data that is redacted or anonymized – but only if those DOGE representatives receive proper training and are subject to a background check.
The case, brought by federal employee unions and a retiree association, is one of several that challenged DOGE access to closely guarded data systems across various agencies – though only some of the cases have resulted in court rulings that have curtailed the ability of the government newcomers to dig into those systems.
Hollander pointed to the alleged lack of training that DOGE affiliates received, as well as the government’s failure to finish background investigations into some of them before giving them the keys to the sensitive Social Security Administration systems. Those systems contained confidential information of millions of Americans, including medical records, bank account numbers and tax return information, she said, describe DOGE’s actions as an “intrusion into the personal affairs of millions of Americans.”
The jugde also knocked the administration for concealing the names of the DOGE affiliates out of concern of harassment while apparently failing to show “a privacy concern for the millions of Americans whose SSA records were made available to the DOGE affiliate.”
The judge, who sits in Baltimore and was appointed by President Barack Obama, even noted the irony in the timing of her ruling, coming on the heels of news that social security numbers of roughly 200 people were disclosed with the release of the John F. Kennedy assassination files.
Although in this case, “the access was made to the DOGE Team, and not (yet) disseminated publicly, the reaction to the disclosure of SSNs in regard to the Kennedy files supports the conclusion here that there is an expectation of privacy with respect to SSNs,” she wrote.
Hollander said the challengers had shown that the administration had likely violated the Privacy Act, which says that for an employee to access an agency’s sensitive records, they must show a “need for the record in the performance of their duties.”
She said that, at a hearing last week, the Justice Department defending the administration “offered no meaningful explanation as to why the DOGE Team was in ‘need’ of unprecedented, unfettered access to virtually SSA’s entire data systems in order to accomplish the goals of modernizing technology, maximizing efficiency and productivity, and detecting fraud, waste, and abuse.”
“Defendants have not submitted declarations from the hired experts on the DOGE Team explaining why such unrestricted and unfettered access is necessary,” she wrote. “They have not provided particularized explanation of how or why virtually the entire data base of SSA is needed to conduct the investigation, or why redacted or anonymized records, at least initially, would be inadequate. The silence on this issue is deafening.”
