US Supreme Court grants DOGE access to sensitive Social Security data

Al Jazeera

14 hours ago

The United States Supreme Court has sided with the administration of President Donald Trump in two cases about government records — and who should have access to them.
On Friday, the six-member conservative majority overturned a lower court's ruling that limited the kinds of data that Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) could access through the Social Security Administration (SSA).
In a separate case, the majority also decided that DOGE was not required to turn over records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a government transparency law.
In both cases, the Supreme Court's three left-leaning justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan — opposed the majority's decision.
DOGE has been at the forefront of Trump's campaign to reimagine the federal government and cut down on bureaucratic 'bloat'.
Unveiled on November 13, just eight days after Trump's re-election, DOGE was designed to 'dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies'.
At first, it was unclear how DOGE would interact with the executive branch: whether it would be an advisory panel, a new department or a nongovernmental entity.
But on January 20, when Trump was sworn in for his second term, he announced that the existing US Digital Service — a technology initiative founded by former President Barack Obama — would be reorganised to create DOGE.
The government efficiency panel has since led a wide-scale overhaul of the federal government, implementing mass layoffs and seeking to shutter entities like the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
It also advertised cost-savings it had achieved or alleged fraud it had uncovered, though many of those claims have been contradicted or questioned by journalists and experts.
In addition, DOGE's sweeping changes to the federal government made it the subject of criticism and concern, particularly as it sought greater access to sensitive data and systems.
Up until last week, DOGE was led by Elon Musk, a billionaire and tech entrepreneur who had been a prominent backer of Trump's re-election bid. Musk and Trump, however, have had a public rupture following the end of the billionaire's tenure as a 'special government employee' in the White House.
That falling-out has left DOGE's future uncertain.
One of DOGE's controversial initiatives has been its push to access Social Security data, in the name of rooting out waste, fraud and abuse.
Early in Trump's second term, both the president and Musk repeated misleading claims that Social Security payments were being made to millions of people listed as 150 years old or older. But fact-checkers quickly refuted that allegation.
Instead, they pointed out that the Social Security Administration has implemented a code to automatically stop payments to anyone listed as alive and more than 115 years old.
They also pointed out that the COBOL programming language flags incomplete entries in the Social Security system with birthdates set back 150 years, possibly prompting the Trump administration's confusion. Less than 1 percent of Social Security payments are made erroneously, according to a 2024 inspector general report.
Still, Trump officials criticised the Social Security Administration, with Musk dubbing it 'the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time' and calling for its elimination.
In March, US District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander blocked DOGE from having unfettered access to Social Security data, citing the sensitive nature of such information.
Social Security numbers, for instance, are key to verifying a person's identity in the US, and the release of such numbers could endanger individual privacy.
Lipton Hollander ruled that DOGE had 'never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA's entire record systems'. She questioned why DOGE had not sought a 'more tailored' approach.
'Instead, the government simply repeats its incantation of a need to modernize the system and uncover fraud,' she wrote in her ruling. 'Its method of doing so is tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer.'
The judge's ruling, however, did allow DOGE to view anonymised data, without personally identifying information.
The Trump administration, nevertheless, appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that Judge Lipton Hollander had exceeded her authority in blocking DOGE's access.
The Supreme Court granted its emergency petition on Friday, lifting Lipton Hollander's temporary restrictions on the data in an unsigned decision.
But Justice Brown Jackson issued a blistering dissent (PDF), suggesting that the Supreme Court was willing to break norms to assist a presidency that was unwilling to let legal challenges play out in lower courts.
'Once again, this Court dons its emergency-responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them,' Brown Jackson wrote.
She argued that the Trump administration had not established that any 'irreparable harm' would occur if DOGE were temporarily blocked from accessing Social Security data.
But by granting the Trump administration's emergency petition, she said the court was 'jettisoning careful judicial decision-making and creating grave privacy risks for millions of Americans in the process'.
The second Supreme Court decision on Friday concerned whether DOGE itself had to surrender documents under federal transparency laws.
The question was raised as part of a lawsuit brought by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a government watchdog group.
It argued that DOGE's sweeping powers suggested it should be subject to laws like FOIA, just like any other executive agency. But CREW also alleged that the ambiguity surrounding DOGE's structures had kept it insulated from outside probes.
'While publicly available information indicates that DOGE is subject to FOIA, the lack of clarity on DOGE's authority leaves that an open question,' CREW said in a statement.
The watchdog group sought to compel DOGE to provide information about its inner workings.
While a US district judge had sided with CREW's request for records in April, the Supreme Court on Friday paused that lower court's decision (PDF). It sent the case back to a court of appeals for further consideration, with instructions that the April order be narrowed.
'Any inquiry into whether an entity is an agency for the purposes of the Freedom of Information Act cannot turn on the entity's ability to persuade,' the Supreme Court's conservative majority ruled.
It also said that the courts needed to exercise 'deference and restraint' regarding 'internal' executive communications.