Justices Grant DOGE Access to Social Security Data and Let the Team Shield Records

As Elon Musk leaves Washington, the team he formed to ferret out waste and abuse won dual victories in the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court on Friday let members of the Department of Government Efficiency, formed by Elon Musk, have access to sensitive records of many millions of Americans held by the Social Security Administration.

The court’s order was brief and unsigned, which is typical when the justices rule on emergency applications.

The Trump administration said it needed the data to root out waste and fraud and to modernize the agency’s operations. Two labor unions and an advocacy group represented by Democracy Forward Foundation sued to block access, saying that much of the information was deeply personal and protected by privacy laws.

The court responded that the agency “may proceed” to allow DOGE access to the records necessary to do its work.

In a second unsigned order on Friday the court handed DOGE another victory, ruling that, for now, the organization does not have to turn over internal records to a government watchdog group as part of a public records lawsuit.

The court’s three liberal members — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented from both rulings.

Although Mr. Musk left Washington at the end of May after declining influence and increasing friction with both President Trump and shareholders of his own companies, the two cases are a reminder of what he left behind.

For the first few months of the Trump administration, Mr. Musk and his team swept through federal agencies, firing federal workers and leaving a flurry of lawsuits in their wake. Mr. Musk’s time in the government, however, failed to deliver on his promised $1 trillion in cuts to the federal budget.

Mr. Musk’s departure from Washington also signaled the souring of his relationship — at least for the time being — with President Trump, which spilled into the public eye in spectacular fashion in a series of social media posts on Thursday.

Justice Jackson, joined by Justice Sotomayor, issued a blistering dissent in the Social Security case, accusing the majority of betraying Americans’ trust and giving the administration special treatment.

“On the one hand, there is a repository of millions of Americans’ legally protected, highly sensitive information that — if improperly handled or disseminated — risks causing significant harm,” she wrote. “On the other, there is the government’s desire to ditch the usual protocols for accessing that data, before the courts have even determined whether DOGE’s access is lawful.”

She added that the court has become too lax in granting the steady stream of emergency applications from the administration, issuing enormously consequential interim rulings on matters like immigration, independent agencies and transgender troops even as challenges continue to wind through lower courts.

“The court is thereby, unfortunately, suggesting that what would be an extraordinary request for everyone else is nothing more than an ordinary day on the docket for this administration,” she wrote.

Lower courts had ruled against the administration. Judge Ellen L. Hollander, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, imposed strict conditions in April on access to the Social Security records in light of what she characterized as the agency’s “abiding commitment to the privacy and confidentiality of the personal information entrusted to it by the American people.”

Judge Hollander said the agency could provide members of DOGE with access to redacted or anonymized data and records but only after they received training on privacy laws and policies, were subjected to background investigations and satisfied other requirements.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit rejected the administration’s request to pause the judge’s injunction while an appeal moved forward.

The Supreme Court’s order on Friday paused Judge Hollander’s ruling as the case moves forward and perhaps even returns to the justices. But its practical effect will be to let DOGE see and use the private information without restriction for the indefinite future.

In the administration’s emergency application asking the Supreme Court to intervene, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, wrote that Judge Hollander, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, had exceeded her authority. “The government cannot eliminate waste and fraud,” he wrote, “if district courts bar the very agency personnel with expertise and the designated mission of curtailing such waste and fraud from performing their jobs.”

The challengers responded that among the sensitive information that DOGE wanted were family court and children’s school records and medical and mental health information, and that the agency was required by law “not to share it beyond the circle of those who truly need it.”

The second DOGE-related order issued by the court on Friday afternoon stemmed from a lawsuit by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, which had filed an expedited request for records under the federal Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, for records related to DOGE.

After CREW did not receive the records, the watchdog group sued Mr. Musk and others connected to his team, arguing that DOGE had violated federal public records laws by failing to process and release the documents.

The dispute hinges on whether DOGE is analogous to other federal agencies, which are generally subject to federal public record laws, or more like presidential advisory groups, which are not.

A federal judge in Washington, Christopher R. Cooper, had concluded that DOGE was likely an agency subject to the records law and ordered it to turn over the documents during the lawsuit discovery process. A three-judge panel on a federal appeals court agreed.

After lawyers for the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene on May 21, the justices announced that they would freeze the discovery request while they considered the application. With Friday’s ruling, they have now extended the pause, blocking CREW from accessing DOGE’s records as part of the discovery process, and instructed the appeals court to narrow the court order outlining what DOGE must turn over.