WASHINGTON – The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on May 2 to let Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access the data of millions of Americans kept by the U.S. Social Security Administration.
A federal judge in Maryland blocked DOGE from getting their hands on the data after she found the agency likely violated a federal privacy law when it gave DOGE unlimited access.
The administration said the judge overstepped, viewing DOGE as the equivalent of intruders breaking into hotel rooms instead of employees trying to modernize the agency’s technology and root out waste.
“District courts should not be able to wield the Privacy Act to substitute their own view of the government’s ‘needs’ for that of the President and agency heads,” Solicitor General John Sauer told the Supreme Court.
DOGE has sought access to multiple agencies as part of its mission to hunt for wasteful spending and dramatically overhaul the federal government.
Musk has falsely claimed that millions of deceased Americans are still receiving Social Security checks.
Two labor unions and an advocacy group sued the SSA.
In March, U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of Maryland said DOGE was intruding into “the personal affairs of millions of Americans” in a fishing expedition that’s based on little more than suspicion.”
A divided federal appeals court on April 30 rejected the Trump administration’s request to intervene.
U.S. Circuit Judge Robert King said the government hadn’t shown a need for unfettered access to the highly sensitive personal information that the American people had every reason to believe would be “fiercely protected.”
DOGE’s mission can be largely accomplished through anonymized and redacted data, the usual way the agency has handled technology upgrades and fraud detection, he wrote.
In a dissent, U.S. Circuit Judge Julius Richardson said the appeals court should have allowed access as it did in cases involving the U.S. Treasury and Education Departments and the Office of Personnel Management.
While the Social Security Administration’s databases are larger, the legal questions “presumably come out the same whether they contain on million rows or one hundred million rows,” he wrote.
The Supreme Court set a May 12 deadline for the labor unions to respond to the administration’s appeal.
(This story has been updated with new information.)
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump admin asks Supreme Court to let DOGE access Social Security data
