Supreme Court lets DOGE access Social Security data of millions of Americans

A divided Supreme Court on Friday sided with the Trump administration for now in a pair of cases involving the U.S. DOGE Service, whose efforts to slash government agencies and obtain data about Americans have been mostly shrouded from public view.

The justices cleared the way in the first case for DOGE representatives to access internal systems at the Social Security Administration that contain the sensitive data of millions of Americans, while litigation on the matter continues.

In the second case, the high court shielded DOGE - which stands for the Department of Government Efficiency - from having to immediately disclose records to a government watchdog group seeking information about the service.

The court’s three liberal justices disagreed with the conservative majority’s actions in both cases.

Taken together, the orders were another example of the Supreme Court granting the Trump administration’s emergency requests to lift or scale back lower court rulings blocking his initiatives while legal challenges play out.

The justices have allowed the administration to bar transgender troops from the military, fire independent agency leaders without cause, halt teacher grants and remove protections for as many as 350,000 Venezuelans while legal challenges to all those efforts make their way through lower courts.

The court has also cleared the way for Trump to revoke legal status for more than 530,000 migrants while litigation continues.

In the Social Security Administration case, the Trump administration asked the justices to intervene after a federal judge in Maryland said DOGE representatives appeared to have violated privacy laws by viewing the personal data of some of the more than 70 million Americans who receive Social Security benefits.

DOGE, created by President Donald Trump and initially overseen by Elon Musk, is collecting the sensitive data of U.S. citizens and residents from across the government, The Washington Post has reported, part of the Trump administration’s effort to find and deport undocumented immigrants and eliminate alleged mismanagement and fraud in government payments.

DOGE has faced several lawsuits over its attempts to access agency records, as well as over Musk’s influence in the government as a temporary employee of the White House who was not confirmed or vetted by Congress.

Two labor unions and an advocacy group went court to try to block DOGE’s access to data at the Social Security Administration, saying such access created a major privacy and security risk for their members and raised concerns among retirees about their benefits. The federal Privacy Act says only employees who need the information to carry out their job responsibilities should have access to agency records.

In February, a clash over DOGE’s access to sensitive data spurred the acting SSA commissioner, Michelle King, to leave her job. Leland Dudek, an agency employee who had been put on leave for unauthorized data sharing, was designated acting commissioner.

The next month, U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander temporarily blocked DOGE and its affiliates from working with Social Security data. Hollander, a nominee of President Barack Obama, said DOGE “essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion.”

Members of the DOGE team were given “unbridled access to the personal and private data of millions of Americans,” the judge added, without having articulated “even a single reason” for why it needs the data.

The order did not prevent the Social Security Administration from giving DOGE access to redacted or anonymized data, and DOGE team members can obtain narrow access to non-anonymized data under specific conditions set by the court.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit declined to block Hollander’s order, and the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who represents the administration at the high court, said the DOGE team has an urgent, legitimate business need to “subject the government’s records to much-needed scrutiny” as part of the president’s efforts to streamline government and modernize outdated systems.

“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,” Sauer told the justices in a court filing.

The Trump administration has repeatedly turned to the Supreme Court to lift lower-court orders blocking its efforts to reshape the federal bureaucracy, halt government spending and quickly deport migrants.

Trump’s attorneys have complained that individual trial court judges like Hollander exceed their authority when they issue orders halting the administration’s initiatives nationwide. The judge viewed employees of the DOGE team “as the equivalent of intruders who break into hotel rooms,” Sauer wrote. “District courts should not be able to wield the Privacy Act to substitute their own view of the government’s ‘needs’ for that of the President and agency heads.”

In response, lawyers from the advocacy group Democracy Forward told the justices there is no emergency requiring the high court to immediately intervene. Their filing said Hollander’s order blocking access to birth dates, driver’s license numbers and health and wage information is narrow and temporary, and called Trump’s actions a “sudden and striking departure from generations of precedent spanning more than a dozen presidential administrations.”

“The Agency now seeks to throw open its data systems to unauthorized (and often unvetted) personnel who have no demonstrated need for the personally identifiable information (“PII”) they seek,” the attorneys said in a court filing.

In the second case, Trump officials had made an emergency appeal to the justices, asking them to put on hold a lower court order requiring DOGE’s administrator to give a deposition and turn over materials to determine if DOGE is subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a FOIA request in January, saying DOGE was operating with little transparency as it gutted agencies, initiated mass layoffs and cut programs.

DOGE rebuffed the request for records, so CREW filed a lawsuit to obtain material including emails, an organizational chart, ethics pledges and financial disclosures, that would provide visibility into how DOGE was carrying out its work.

Trump officials said DOGE is a presidential advisory board - not a government agency - so it is exempt from complying with the public records law.

In their emergency order on Friday, the justices said a lower court order giving CREW access to some records was not “appropriately tailored.”

“The separation of powers concerns counsel judicial deference and restraint in the context of discovery regarding internal Executive Branch communications,” the majority found.

The justices remanded the case to a lower court to narrow the scope of the order requiring DOGE to turn over documents.