WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday allowed members of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency to access Social Security Administration data.
The conservative-majority court, with its three liberal justices objecting, granted an emergency application filed by the Trump administration asking the justices to lift an injunction issued by a federal judge in Maryland.
The unsigned order said that members of the DOGE team assigned to the Social Security Administration should have “access to the agency records in question in order for those members to do their work.”
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Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissenting opinion questioning the need for the court to intervene on an emergency basis.
“In essence, the ‘urgency’ underlying the government’s stay application is the mere fact that it cannot be bothered to wait for the litigation process to play out before proceeding as it wishes,” she added.
DOGE, set up by billionaire Elon Musk before his falling out with President Donald Trump, says it wants to modernize systems and detect waste and fraud at the agency. The data it seeks includes Social Security numbers, medical records, and tax and banking information.
“These teams have a business need to access the data at their assigned agency and subject the government’s records to much-needed scrutiny,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in court papers.
The lawsuit challenging DOGE’s actions was brought by two unions — the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the American Federation of Teachers — as well as the Alliance for Retired Americans. They alleged that allowing broader access to the personal information would violate a federal law called the Privacy Act as well as the Administrative Procedure Act.
“The agency is obligated by the Privacy Act and its own regulations, practices, and procedures to keep that information secure — and not to share it beyond the circle of those who truly need it,” the challengers’ lawyers wrote in court papers.
U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander had ruled that DOGE had no need to access the specific data at issue. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond, Virginia, declined to block Hollander’s decision, leading to the Trump administration to file its emergency request at the Supreme Court.
In a separate order issued at the same time in another case involving DOGE, the Supreme Court granted another request filed by the Trump administration.
That decision allows the Trump administration to, for now, shield DOGE from freedom of information requests seeking thousands of pages of material.
The move formalizes a decision issued by Chief Justice John Roberts on May 23 that temporarily put lower court decisions on hold while the Supreme Court considered what next steps to take. The court also told lower courts to limit the scope of what material could be disclosed.
It means the government will not have to respond to requests for documents and allow for the deposition of the DOGE administrator, Amy Gleason, as a lower court had ruled, while litigation continues.
The three liberal justices noted their disagreement with that decision, too.
