Judge orders new limits on DOGE data access at Social Security Administration

A federal judge has once again blocked Department of Government Efficiency staffers who are operating inside the Social Security Administration (SSA) from accessing sensitive personal information of millions of Americans.

The issuing of a preliminary injunction comes in a lawsuit filed by a group of unions and retirees in Maryland, which is one of more than a dozen suits to raise alarms about the kind of data DOGE has accessed, and how such data could be used.

In a 148-page memorandum explaining the decision, U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander wrote late Thursday that “the issue here is not the work that DOGE or the Agency want to do,” but rather “how they want to do the work.”

“To be sure, rooting out possible fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the SSA is in the public interest,” Hollander wrote, referencing DOGE’s stated aims. “But, that does not mean that the government can flout the law to do so.”

Hollander, an Obama appointee, previously granted a temporary restraining order against DOGE on March 20, questioning at the time why the agency did not use a more targeted look at Social Security data that includes personally identifiable information (PII) and calling DOGE’s methods “tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer.“

A federal appeals court dismissed on April 1 the Trump administration’s effort to lift Hollander’s temporary restraining order.

Now, weeks later, Hollander said the Trump administration still did not adequately explain why it needed to give a handful of staffers “unprecedented, unfettered access to virtually SSA’s entire data systems,” in order to implement the DOGE mandate of detecting waste, fraud and abuse.

“The DOGE Team seeks access to the PII that millions of Americans entrusted to SSA, and the SSA Defendants have agreed to provide it,” she wrote. “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.”

In seeking to justify the desire of DOGE team members to access PII in Social Security databases, SSA’s acting Commissioner Lee Dudek had listed three projects the DOGE team needed to work on, but the judge wrote that his “explanations are imprecise, contradictory, and insufficient.”

This latest ruling prevents DOGE staffers from accessing Social Security databases that contain PII; directs them to delete any non-anonymized data in their possession from those databases, and to remove any software that DOGE staffers have previously installed on SSA systems; and to stop accessing or altering Social Security code.

The restrictions do not apply to non-DOGE SSA staff or to DOGE members who want to use anonymized data and have received proper privacy training.

NPR has reached out to DOGE and the SSA for comment.

Continued concern over DOGE’s data access

The Social Security Administration is one of many federal agencies where federal judges have found the Elon Musk-led DOGE effort has likely violated the law in its efforts to access sensitive databases maintained by the federal government.

A top Elon Musk ally working inside the Social Security Administration has recently pushed dubious claims about noncitizen voting, apparently using the type of personal data that court records suggest DOGE should not have.

There are other concerns about what DOGE is doing inside the federal government.

This week, a whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board said someone had removed case management data from the agency after DOGE accessed its system last month.