Supreme Court Gives DOGE Access To Social Security Data

The Supreme Court handed the Department of Government Efficiency – which may or may not exist for long after the recent spat between Musk and Trump – two big wins late on June 6 in its effort to reduce the size of the federal government.

The nation’s highest court issued the two unsigned rulings at the same time: the first order removed a block on DOGE staffers accessing data at the Social Security Administration. 

Granting an emergency request by the Trump administration, the justices lifted a lower court order that for now had barred DOGE employees or affiliates from accessing the agency’s systems and directed them to delete personal information they already had gathered.

“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 said in a brief unsigned order.

The court’s three liberal justices objected. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the majority shouldn’t have rushed to the administration’s aid before the courts have time to determine whether DOGE’s access is lawful. “Once again, this Court dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them,” she wrote in dissent.

The second order, in U.S. DOGE Service v. CREW, formally blocked lower court orders requiring DOGE to respond to freedom of information requests in a pending lawsuit. That order came after Chief Justice John Roberts on May 23 issued an administrative stay temporarily blocking the lower court orders. The court’s three liberals again objected.

The Trump administration has said the data will help DOGE, created by a Jan. 20 executive order, streamline government and ferret out fraud. The executive order directed the entity to “implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”

The injunction was issued by U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander in Maryland, who said that DOGE failed to justify its need for sweeping access to the personal information of tens of millions of Americans, including Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses, income and assets, citizenship status, medical information and disability status.

Hollander did allow DOGE team members access to some redacted or anonymized information, so long as they completed training and background checks comparable to those typically required for SSA employees.

The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by a group of labor unions, who allege data-sharing with DOGE violates the Privacy Act of 1974, which strictly regulates what information about American citizens can be stored by federal agencies, and who can access the data.

The Social Security Administration has been a significant target for Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO who launched DOGE. He has called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” Musk has since stepped back from his involvement with DOGE.

Attorneys representing DOGE had argued that anonymizing the data would be too difficult and disrupt its efforts to root out fraud.

DOGE has had some success gathering data from federal agencies. In one recent decision, an appeals panel lifted an order that barred the Education Department, the Office of Personnel Management and the Treasury Department from disclosing to DOGE the personal identifying information of roughly two million Americans.