By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday permitted the Department of Government Efficiency, a key player in President Donald Trump’s drive to slash the federal workforce, broad access to personal information on millions of Americans in Social Security Administration data systems while a legal challenge plays out.
At the request of the Justice Department, the justices put on hold Maryland-based U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander’s order that had largely blocked DOGE’s access to “personally identifiable information” in data such as medical and financial records while litigation proceeds in a lower court. Hollander found that allowing DOGE unfettered access likely would violate a federal privacy law.
The court’s brief, unsigned order did not provide a rationale for siding with DOGE. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Its three liberal justices dissented from the order.
Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a dissent that was joined by fellow liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, criticized the court’s majority for granting DOGE “unfettered data access” despite the administration’s “failure to show any need or any interest in complying with existing privacy safeguards.”
In a separate order on Friday, the Supreme Court extended its block on judicial orders requiring DOGE to turn over records to a government watchdog group that sought details on the entity established by Trump and Musk.
DOGE swept through federal agencies as part of the Republican president’s effort, spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk, to eliminate federal jobs, downsize and reshape the U.S. government and root out what they see as wasteful spending. Musk formally ended his government work on May 30.
Two labor unions and an advocacy group sued to stop DOGE from accessing sensitive data at the Social Security Administration, or SSA, including Social Security numbers for Americans, bank account data, tax information, earnings history and immigration records.
The agency is a major provider of government benefits, sending checks each month to more than 70 million recipients including retirees and disabled Americans.
In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs argued that the Social Security Administration had been “ransacked” and that DOGE members had been installed without proper vetting or training and demanded access to some of the agency’s most sensitive data systems.
Hollander in an April 17 ruling found that DOGE had failed to explain why its stated mission required “unprecedented, unfettered access to virtually SSA’s entire data systems.”
“For some 90 years, SSA has been guided by the foundational principle of an expectation of privacy with respect to its records,” Hollander wrote. “This case exposes a wide fissure in the foundation.”
Hollander issued a preliminary injunction that prohibited DOGE staffers and anyone working with them from accessing data containing personal information, with only narrow exceptions. The judge’s ruling did allow DOGE affiliates to access data that had been stripped of private information as long as those seeking access had gone through the proper training and passed background checks.
Hollander also ordered DOGE affiliates to “disgorge and delete” any personal information already in their possession.
The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a 9-6 vote declined on April 30 to pause Hollander’s block on DOGE’s unlimited access to Social Security Administration records.
Justice Department lawyers in their Supreme Court filing characterized Hollander’s order as judicial overreach.
“The district court is forcing the executive branch to stop employees charged with modernizing government information systems from accessing the data in those systems because, in the court’s judgment, those employees do not ‘need’ such access,” they wrote.
The six dissenting judges wrote that the case should have been treated the same as one in which 4th Circuit panel ruled 2-1 to allow DOGE to access data at the U.S. Treasury and Education Departments and the Office of Personnel Management.
In a concurring opinion, seven judges who ruled against DOGE wrote that the case involving Social Security data was “substantially stronger” with “vastly greater stakes,” citing “detailed and profoundly sensitive Social Security records,” such as family court and school records of children, mental health treatment records and credit card information.
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Diane Craft and Alistair Bell)
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