The Division of Authorities Effectivity strategy’s to figuring out fraud on the Social Safety Administration “is tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer,” a federal choose stated Thursday, blocking DOGE’s limitless entry to delicate company knowledge.
In a 137-page ruling, U.S. District Decide Ellen Lipton Hollander wrote the Trump administration by no means justified the necessity to entry the information — which they argued was vital to identifying alleged fraud — and certain violated a number of federal legal guidelines in doing so.
“The DOGE Workforce is basically engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in the hunt for a fraud epidemic, primarily based on little greater than suspicion. It has launched a seek for the proverbial needle within the haystack, with none concrete data that the needle is definitely within the haystack,” she wrote.
Elon Musk seems on in the course of the day of a gathering with Home Republicans to debate the Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE) on Capitol Hill in Washington, Mar. 5, 2025.
Kent Nishimura/Reuters
The choose’s order blocks the company from granting DOGE entry to methods containing personally identifiable info and orders DOGE members to destroy any knowledge of their possession that identifies particular person taxpayers. Nonetheless, the choose’s determination permits DOGE to proceed to permit entry anonymized knowledge from the company.
In keeping with Hollander, the choice to provide DOGE “limitless entry to SSA’s complete document system” endangered the delicate and personal info of tens of millions of Individuals, risking info together with Social Safety numbers, bank card info, medical and psychological well being data, hospitalization data, marriage and beginning certificates, and financial institution info.
“The federal government has not even tried to clarify why a extra tailor-made, measured, titrated strategy shouldn’t be appropriate to the duty,” she wrote. “As a substitute, the federal government merely repeats its incantation of a must modernize the system and uncover fraud. Its technique of doing so is tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer.”
Two folks enter a Social Safety Administration workplace in suburban Detroit, March 7, 2025.
Jim West/UCG/Common Pictures Group by way of Getty Pictures
The lawsuit difficult DOGE’s entry was filed final month by two nationwide unions and an advocacy group who argued DOGE’s entry violated privateness legal guidelines and the Administrative Procedures Act. In a press release to ABC Information, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers celebrated the choice as a “main win for working folks and retirees throughout the nation.”
“The court docket noticed that Elon Musk and his unqualified lackeys current a grave hazard to Social Safety and have illegally accessed the information of tens of millions of Individuals,” AFSCME President Lee Saunders stated in a press release.
In her determination, the choose additionally identified the irony that DOGE has accessed the delicate info of tens of millions of Individuals whereas the identities of the DOGE workers working within the SSA have been hid for privateness causes.
“The protection doesn’t seem to share a privateness concern for the tens of millions of Individuals whose SSA data had been made out there to the DOGE associates, with out their consent,” she wrote.
