Federal judge rules against DOGE access to data of millions of Americans — but there’s a catch

A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against the Department of Government Efficiency having access to the data of millions of Americans.

DOGE was tasked by President Donald Trump to cut out waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending and was initially headed up by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. After numerous lawsuits challenging the validity of the agency’s actions, the administration announced that it was led instead by Amy Gleason.

‘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.’

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander in Baltimore sided with a group of labor unions that filed a lawsuit claiming DOGE’s actions violated privacy laws and put Americans’ data at risk.

Hollander questioned why DOGE needed to have “seemingly unfettered access” to data at the Social Security Administration, to which government attorneys argued that anonymizing the data would significantly slow down their efforts.

“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,” Hollander wrote in the ruling.

The injunction ordered DOGE workers to delete any non-anonymized data from Social Security records they had obtained since Jan. 20. The ruling allows them to have access to the data once it’s anonymized and the workers receive training and background checks.

Hollander had previously criticized DOGE in a temporary injunction in the same case in March.

“The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,” she previously 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.”

In the more recent ruling, Hollander acknowledged that the DOGE mission was a worthwhile pursuit.

“The objective to address fraud, waste, mismanagement, and bloat is laudable, and one that the American public presumably applauds and supports,” she wrote. “Indeed, the taxpayers have every right to expect their government to make sure that their hard earned money is not squandered.”

The 75-year-old judge was appointed by former President Barack Obama.

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