Judge Orders DOGE Out Of Personal Social Security Data
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of Maryland issued a detailed enumerated temporary restraining order barring DOGE from accessing the personally identifiable information of Americans kept by the Social Security Administration. In her scathing 137-page opinion accompanying the order, Hollander berated the Trump administration for its actions and for its lame defense:
The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion. It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.
To facilitate the expedition, SSA provided members of the SSA DOGE Team with unbridled access to the personal and private data of millions of Americans, including but not limited to Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, hospitalization records, drivers' license numbers, bank and credit card information, tax information, income history, work history, birth and marriage certificates, and home and work addresses.
Yet, defendants, with so called experts on the DOGE Team, never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA's entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government. Indeed, the government has not even attempted to explain why a more tailored, measured, titrated approach is not suitable to the task. Instead, the government simply repeats its incantation of a need to modernize the system and uncover fraud. Its method of doing so is tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer
In response, Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek petulantly threatened to essentially shut down the Social Security Administration because the TRO broadly targeted 'DOGE affiliates':
'My anti-fraud team would be DOGE affiliates. My IT staff would be DOGE affiliates,' Dudek said. 'As it stands, I will follow it exactly and terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems.'
He said he would ask the judge to immediately clarify her order. 'Really, I want to turn it off and let the courts figure out how they want to run a federal agency,' he said.
Dudek, you'll recall, was the low-level SSA bureaucrat who showed enough affinity for the arriving DOGE team to get himself elevated to the top spot.
The Trump DOJ is pushing U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to the breaking point as he seeks to determine whether to hold the Trump administration in contempt of court for violating his order halting deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.
After asking for and getting a last-minute reprieve on a key filing deadline, the Justice Department missed its new deadline and filed a declaration from a low-level acting ICE official that essentially told the judge to pound sand.
Calling the government's filing 'woefully insufficient,' Boasberg quickly ordered the government to meet a new set of deadlines and began to set the stage for a contempt hearing, though he hasn't scheduled one yet. The Justice Department met the first of those deadlines this morning with a terse, minimally compliant declaration from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that the administration is considering invoking the state secrets privilege.
A hearing later today will refocus the case for now on the substance of last weekend's Alien Enemies Act deportations of Venezuelan nationals with claimed but unsubstantiated criminal gang ties. They remained imprisoned in a labor camp in El Salvador after the Trump administration rushed through the paperwork and flight logistics in what seems like a clear effort to avoid judicial scrutiny until after the fact.
Meanwhile, the NYT reports that the U.S. intelligence community issued an assessment last month that Tren de Aragua was not controlled by the Venezuelan government, undercutting a key portion of the Trump administration's already dubious justification for invoking the Alien Enemies Act.
'Honest to god, I've never seen anything like it. We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse. These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.'–Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, coauthor of 'How Democracies Die' and 'Competitive Authoritarianism,' on the speed of Trump's subversion of of the judiciary
You've seen by now that President Trump played the Paul Weiss law firm like a drum, targeting it with an unlawful executive order, drawing it into a negotiation over how much of its professional ethics and independence it would get to keep, and then publicly holding the law firm's scalp up high for everyone to see.
The Justice Department is now moving to short circuit the civil lawsuits against Donald Trump over Jan. 6.
U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles of Virginia issued an order blocking the deportation of Georgetown University fellow Badar Khan Suri until his habeas action can be heard. DHS says Suri, who had his visa unilaterally revoked without due process, was singled out because of his father-in-law's ties to Hamas. In a new filing in the case, Suri's wife, who is an American citizen, attested that her husband has only met her father twice, both times more than a decade ago.
DoE: President Trump issued an executive order purporting to abolish the Department of Education
IMLS: DOGE descended on the DC offices of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the bedrock of federal support for the nation's museums and libraries, has ignited fears among union leaders that the agency's staff could be next on the chopping block, NBC News reports.
'Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged Fox News viewers Wednesday night to buy Tesla stock, an apparent violation of federal ethics rules that prohibit officials from endorsing products or businesses,' WaPo reports.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invited Elon Musk to the Pentagon for a briefing today that the NYT reports was going to the U.S. military's highly secret contingency plan for a war with China. After the NYT report, President Trump and the Pentagon denied that the briefing session was going to be about military plans involving China.
The WSJ duplicated the NYT's reporting and included this remarkable paragraph:
Musk, according to one person familiar with the arrangements, is receiving the briefing because he asked for one. He has a security clearance but isn't in the military chain of command or known to be a military adviser to Trump.
Because he asked for one.
CNN: 'Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's February memo ordering all diversity, equity and inclusion-related content to be removed from Pentagon websites was so vague that military units were instructed to simply use keyword searches like 'racism,' 'ethnicity,' 'history' and 'first' when searching for articles and photos to remove, and to interpret the directive 'broadly,' multiple defense officials told CNN.'
The Pentagon's absurd purge of a Jackie Robinson tribute page has cost a controversial senior Defense Department spokesman his position.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has 'as many as a thousand FBI agents' working day and night to scour investigative files on the late Jeffrey Epstein to satisfy right-wing demands that more materials be released, ABC News reports.
The Trump White House scrambled to clean up the mess it created by exposing Social Security numbers when releasing JFK assassination files, WaPo reports.
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