CNN
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The Supreme Court handed the Department of Government Efficiency a pair of significant wins on Friday, allowing the entity to access sensitive Social Security data for millions of Americans while simultaneously pausing an effort to look into whether it is subject to a key transparency law.
In the first and perhaps more important decision, a majority of the court allowed DOGE to review data at the Social Security Administration in an ostensible effort to rout out fraud and “modernize outdated systems.” Critics and lower courts suggested DOGE was engaged in a fishing expedition through highly sensitive data.
“We conclude that, under the present circumstances, SSA may proceed to afford members of the SSA DOGE Team access to the agency records in question in order for those members to do their work,” the court wrote in an unsigned order.
The conservative Supreme Court minutes later separately paused a lower court’s order that required DOGE to turn over documents as part of a lawsuit claiming the entity, like other government agencies, should be subject to federal records requests. While the Supreme Court left open the possibility that some of that information could ultimately be provided, it asked lower courts to “narrow” its scope.
The court’s three liberal justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — also dissented from that decision.
Together, the court’s orders marked important wins for DOGE amid a public feud between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who once led the entity as the key tool the White House was using to shrink and reshape the federal government.
The decision in the Social Security case will “hand DOGE staffers the highly sensitive data of millions of Americans,” Jackson wrote in her dissent. She warned of “grave privacy risks for millions of Americans.”
The emergency appeal from the Trump administration was the first that put DOGE front and center before the high court. US Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued in court filings that the lower court did not have the power to “micromanage” DOGE’s ability to access data for the purpose of addressing government waste, fraud and abuse. The administration’s victory in this dispute will likely have repercussions for the other cases concerning DOGE’s ability to access government data systems.
Americans should be concerned about how DOGE has handled highly sensitive data so far, said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Romig, who worked as a senior adviser at the agency during the Biden administration, pointed to sworn statements in the case that indicate DOGE representatives accessed data from non-secure locations.
“While the appeals court considers whether DOGE is violating the law, its operatives will have ‘God-level’ access to Social Security numbers, earnings records, bank routing numbers, mental and reproductive health records and much more,” Romig told CNN.
The trial judge in the Social Security case had ruled that the challengers were likely to succeed on their arguments that the administration had violated the Privacy Act by giving DOGE the keys to the closely guarded data systems – which contain Americans’ financial records, medical information and sensitive information related to children – without clearly articulating why DOGE needed that access.
The Social Security Administration case stood out for the robust evidentiary record the trial judge relied on in issuing her preliminary injunction. Key to findings of US District Judge Ellen Hollander was that the administration hadn’t showed why DOGE needed sweeping access to personal information of Americans that was held by agency. She concluded that the projects the administration said DOGE was working on could be done largely using anonymized data.
The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals kept Hollander’s preliminary injunction in place.
Nearly a dozen DOGE affiliates have been installed at the agency, according to court filings, and a mid-level career official who facilitated the DOGE team view into the data, over the objections of Social Security Administration leadership, was put on administrative leave. The Trump administration then elevated that official, Leland Dudek, to acting commissioner. The Senate confirmed Frank Bisignano as commissioner in early May.
DOGE’s data access was first put on hold with a temporary restraining order in March.
The Trump administration has pointed to three specific projects that justified granting DOGE access to the systems: a project, known as “Are You Alive?” scrutinizing whether payments are improperly going to deceased individuals; a scrub of agency data, known as the Death Data Clean Up Project, to update records of people the government believes to be deceased; and the Fraud Detention Project, which is looking at potential fraud in changes people make to their records, including with wage reporting and direct deposit information.
The suit was filed by a coalition of labor and advocacy groups, which were represented by Democracy Forward. In response to the decision, the coalition said it was a “scary day for millions of people” and warned that the decision would allow the administration to “steal Americans’ private and personal data.”
Though technical, the separate case involving DOGE records has raised fundamental questions about the power and transparency of an entity that has slashed agency budgets with unusual speed. A left-leaning watchdog, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, sued to gain access to documents that would shed light on the entity’s operation.
Trump’s emergency appeal to the Supreme Court requested that the justices halt a lower court order that would allow CREW to depose DOGE leadership and review documents to better understand the entity’s role within the federal government. The Supreme Court granted that request but said a more limited discovery might be permitted.
“While we’re obviously disappointed that the Supreme Court chose to revise aspects of our discovery requests,” said Jordan Libowitz, a CREW spokesperson, “we’re pleased that the court allowed discovery to proceed, including depositions.”
The underlying question in the case is whether DOGE is an agency that, like most other parts of the federal government, is subject to public review. If it is, that could serve as a check on what DOGE can accomplish both by allowing the public to see what’s happening behind the scenes, and by giving legal challengers information they could use in court to potentially reverse some of its most drastic actions.
The Trump administration, which the president has repeatedly claimed is the most transparent in history, has aggressively fought the case, describing DOGE as a “presidential advisory body” within the White House that is tasked “with providing recommendations” rather than making decisions. Given those advisory functions, the Department of Justice argued, DOGE is exempt from FOIA requirements.
US District Judge Casey Cooper, nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama, had ordered that DOGE turn over documents in the case and also approved a deposition of DOGE acting administrator Amy Gleason. A federal appeals court in Washington, DC, declined to reverse the discovery decision. Cooper ruled in March that DOGE is likely covered by FOIA, which allows public interest groups and the media to obtain internal government records detailing agency conduct.
This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.
