The Department of Government Efficiency can have unimpeded access to sensitive Social Security records for millions of people, the Supreme Court ruled Friday.
The justices granted the Trump administration’s emergency request to lift a lower-court order that had blocked a DOGE team assigned to the Social Security Administration from viewing or obtaining personal information in the agency’s systems.
The court’s majority provided no detailed explanation for its ruling, but in a three-paragraph unsigned order, the majority wrote: “We conclude that, under the present circumstances, SSA may proceed to afford members of the SSA DOGE Team access to the agency records in question in order for those members to do their work.”
The three liberal justices dissented. In a 10-page dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the decision creates “grave privacy risks for millions of Americans.”
Trump administration lawyers claimed the DOGE team members needed unfettered access to Social Security’s data in order to detect and halt fraudulent payments, but a federal judge in Maryland ruled that the breadth of DOGE’s access violated federal law and put the data at risk of intentional or unintentional disclosure.