Elon Musk and company’s apparent desire to suck up as much personal information as they can about Americans has hit another snag. U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander issued a preliminary injunction that will at least temporarily prevent staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing sensitive data on millions of Americans while working within the Social Security Administration.
The ruling, which comes in response to a lawsuit filed by several unions and groups of retirees in Maryland, follows a previous temporary restraining order granted by Hollander questioned why DOGE would need to access personally identifiable information (PII) as part of its work to allegedly identify fraud and waste within the agency. The injunction, which comes several weeks after the initial intervention, was issued because DOGE has not explained why the SSA should provide them access to PII.
“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 wrote.
Notably, Hollander did not rule that DOGE’s stated goal is a problem. Instead, it’s how the pseudo-agency is going about achieving those ends. “To be sure, rooting out possible fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the SSA is in the public interest,” the judge wrote. “But, that does not mean that the government can flout the law to do so.”
DOGE and the Trump administration more broadly seem to disagree with that notion, operating more closely to the premise that they get to do whatever they want, and it’s beneath them to have to explain their methods. Liz Huston, a White House spokesperson, told NPR, “The American people gave President Trump a clear mandate to uproot waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal government. The Trump Administration will continue to fight to fulfill the mandate.”
That seems to suggest that DOGE will continue to try to stuff its pockets with as much information as it can snag from the stashes held at these government agencies. DOGE has, on multiple occasions, according to the courts, violated privacy laws by allowing staffers to access sensitive data. Musk’s minions have also allegedly attempted to access data related to union members from the Office of Personnel Management. Earlier this month, a whistleblower told NPR that DOGE seemed to be sending out data from the National Labor Relations Board, including information that may relate to ongoing legal cases and sensitive corporate information.
As all of this has happened, Musk’s bunch has not justified their need to access or interact with that information. In fact, Judge Hollander previously stated in a ruling that the Trump administration has “never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government.” The same has been true of its access to data in other agencies. The answer seems to boil down to “Because we can.”
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