Supreme Court hands DOGE big wins in Social Security, records cases
The Supreme Court on Friday handed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) two major victories in its expanding legal battle over drastic efforts to reshape the federal bureaucracy.
In two separate emergency rulings issued simultaneously, the court lifted a block on DOGE personnel accessing sensitive Social Security Administration (SSA) systems and wiped a ruling forcing DOGE to turn over discovery in a records lawsuit.
Both rulings appeared to be along the Supreme Court’s ideological lines, with the court’s three Democrat-appointed justices publicly dissenting.
The decisions come as President Trump’s relationship with billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, the face of DOGE for months, publicly imploded Thursday. His administration continues to defend DOGE’s work in the courts.
Social Security
In the Social Security case, the justices lifted a Maryland-based federal judge’s order blocking DOGE from snooping around the SSA’s systems that contain personally identifiable information, including Social Security numbers, medical and mental health records, bank data, and earnings history.
The majority did not explain the reasoning, only saying that the “SSA may proceed to afford members of the SSA DOGE Team access to the agency record” under the present circumstances.
In dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, said the Trump administration hadn’t met the court’s high bar for emergency relief, accusing her colleagues of “jettisoning careful judicial decisionmaking.”
“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,” Jackson wrote.
“I would proceed without fear or favor to require DOGE and the Government to do what all other litigants must do to secure a stay from this Court,” she continued.
Justice Elena Kagan also dissented, but she did not join the duo’s opinion.
The challenge to DOGE’s ability to poke around in the SSA’s systems came from a coalition of government unions, backed by the left-leaning legal group Democracy Forward, that claimed DOGE’s unfettered access to the sensitive data ran afoul of privacy laws and the SSA’s own rules and regulations.
U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander’s order allowed the SSA to provide DOGE with access to redacted or anonymized data and records, but it required DOGE agents to receive the necessary training for those systems. She wrote that DOGE’s efforts to slim down the federal bureaucracy weren’t the problem at hand, but rather “how they want to do the work.”
Hollander is an appointee of former President Obama.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer had argued that her preliminary injunction undermined DOGE’s mission to streamline and modernize the government while rooting out waste and fraud.
He criticized the nationwide relief as a “now-familiar theme,” alluding to several Justice Department emergency appeals challenging universal injunctions — a practice the justices heard arguments about last month in the administration’s appeal of an order blocking Trump’s bid to narrow birthright citizenship.
“The government cannot eliminate waste and fraud if district courts bar the very agency personnel with expertise and the designated mission of curtailing such waste and fraud from performing their jobs,” Sauer wrote in the government’s emergency application.
