WASHINGTON – A divided Supreme Court on June 6 said Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency can have complete access to the data of millions of Americans kept by the U.S. Social Security Administration.
The court paused a judge’s order blocking DOGE from immediately getting broad access to the data which includes Social Security numbers, medical and mental health information, tax return information and citizenship records.
The court’s three liberal justices − Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson − disagreed with that decision.
“The Government wants to give DOGE unfettered access to this personal, non-anonymized information right now —before the courts have time to assess whether DOGE’s access is lawful,” Jackson wrote in a dissent joined by Sotomayor. “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.”
Jackson said the court has “truly lost its moorings” when deciding what’s worthy of emergency intervention and may be showing preferential treatment for the administration.
“It says, in essence, that although other stay applicants must point to more than the annoyance of compliance with lower court orders they don’t like,” she wrote, “the Government can approach the courtroom bar with nothing more than that and obtain relief from this Court nevertheless.”
In a brief and unsigned decision, the majority said access is warranted now because the courts are likely to ultimately decide that DOGE can have the information. A delay would harm the administration’s reorganization efforts and not be in the public’s interest, the majority wrote.
In March, U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of Maryland said DOGE was intruding on “the personal affairs of millions of Americans” in a fishing expedition that’s based on little more than suspicion.”
Hollander limited DOGE’s access to the information while the courts assess the legality of the Trump administration’s actions.
The administration argued the judge overstepped, viewing DOGE staffers as the equivalent of intruders breaking into hotel rooms rather than as employees trying to modernize the agency’s technology and root out waste – as DOGE officials said they intended to do.
“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 in an emergency appeal.
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 Americans who are deceased are still receiving Social Security checks.
Two labor unions and an advocacy group sued the SSA after DOGE began digging into personal data.
They told the Supreme Court justices they shouldn’t intervene because the administration hadn’t shown an emergency need to access data beyond what the district judge allowed.
In addition to overseeing Social Security benefits for retirees and disabled people, the Social Security Administration helps administer programs run by other agencies, including Medicare and Medicaid.
A divided federal appeals court on April 30 rejected the Trump administration’s request to block the district judge’s order.
U.S. Circuit Judge Robert King of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond, Virginia, 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, which is the usual way the agency has handled technology upgrades and fraud detection, he wrote.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Supreme Court lets DOGE access Social Security data for now
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