Washington — The Trump administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to let the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have access to the sensitive information kept by the Social Security Administration.
The emergency appeal to the Supreme Court stems from an injunction issued by a federal district court judge in Maryland who limited DOGE’s access to Social Security Administration system of records containing the personal information of millions of Americans.
The judge concluded in her April decision that the plaintiffs, two labor unions and an advocacy group represented by Democracy Forward, were likely to succeed on their claim that the Social Security Administration’s decision to give DOGE access to millions of Americans’ confidential information violated the Privacy Act and a federal law governing the agency rulemaking process.
“T]he issue here is not the work that DOGE or the agency want to do. The issue is about how they want to do the work,” U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander wrote in her 145-page decision. “The DOGE Team seeks access to the [personally identifiable information] that millions of Americans entrusted to SSA, and the SSA defendants have agreed to provide it. For some 90 years, SSA has been guided by the foundational principle of an expectation of privacy with respect to its records. This case exposes a wide fissure in the foundation.”
She did allow DOGE team members to have access to redacted or anonymized information from the Social Security Administration, but only if they met certain conditions, such as receiving trainings and undergoing background investigations.
The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit declined a Trump administration request to halt that injunction, leading it to seek emergency relief from the Supreme Court.
In asking the high court to lift the district court’s injunction, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that it is forcing the executive branch to stop federal employees tasked with modernizing government systems from accessing the data contained within them.
“The government cannot eliminate waste and fraud if district courts bar the very agency personnel with expertise and the designated mission of curtailing such waste and fraud from performing their jobs,” he said.
The solicitor general, who argues on behalf of the federal government before the Supreme Court, said that the plaintiffs who brought the case did not have the legal right to sue. Sauer also argued that the district court did not have the legal authority to issue sweeping relief, which he said harmed “urgent federal priorities” and thwarted the executive branch’s functions.
“Employees charged with modernizing government information systems and routing out fraud, waste, and abuse in data systems plainly need access to those systems,” he wrote. “Yet the district court instead viewed agency employees within the SSA DOGE team as the equivalent of intruders who break into hotel rooms.”
The Trump administration has sought emergency relief from the Supreme Court in at least a dozen cases, as more than 200 legal challenges targeting many aspects of second-term agenda move their way through the federal courts. But the legal battle over DOGE’s access to Social Security data is the first directly involving the cost-cutting task force to land before the justices.
President Trump established DOGE on his first day back in the White House and has said that he tasked Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, with leading the initiative. The White House has said, though, that Amy Gleason, who worked at DOGE’s predecessor entity, U.S. Digital Service, is formally the administrator of DOGE. The task force’s employees have been dispatched to more than a dozen agencies as part of the president’s plan to shrink the size of the government.
But DOGE’s attempts to access Americans’ sensitive data at agencies including the Departments of Treasury and Education, and the Office of Personnel Management, have led to their own set of lawsuits claiming the task force’s members have not been complying with the Privacy Act, the federal law that aims to protect Americans’ private information.
Musk’s role in DOGE, too, has sparked a set of challenges that argue his actions violate the Constitution’s Appointments Clause. A different federal judge in Maryland ruled in March that Musk and DOGE likely violated the Constitution through its unilateral shut down of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit agreed to pause that decision while it considers an appeal by the Trump administration.