Trump administration asks Supreme Court to let DOGE access Social Security systems
WASHINGTON AP The Trump administration questioned the Supreme Court on Friday to clear the way for Elon Musk s Department of Governing body Efficiency to access Social Safeguard systems containing personal figures on millions of Americans The urgency appeal is the first in a string of applications to the high court involving DOGE s swift-moving work across the federal ruling body It comes after a judge in Maryland restricted the band s access to Social Defense under federal privacy laws The agency holds personal records on nearly everyone in the country including school records bank details salary information and physiological and mental medical records for disability recipients according to court documents The leadership says the club demands access to target waste in the federal leadership Musk now preparing to step back from his work with DOGE has been focused on Social Precaution as an alleged hotbed of fraud The billionaire entrepreneur has described it as a Ponzi scheme and insisted that reducing waste in the activity is an major way to cut governing body spending Solicitor General John Sauer argued Friday that the judge s restrictions disrupt DOGE s critical work and inappropriately interfere with executive-branch decisions Left undisturbed this preliminary injunction will only invite further judicial incursions into internal agency decision-making he wrote He demanded the justices to block the order from U S District Judge Ellen Hollander in Maryland as the lawsuit plays out An appeals court previously refused to right now to lift the block on DOGE access though it split along ideological lines Conservative judges in the minority explained there s no evidence that the organization has done any targeted snooping or exposed personal information The lawsuit was originally filed by a group of labor unions and retirees represented by the group Democracy Forward The Supreme Court petitioned them for a response to the administration s appeal by May More than two dozen lawsuits have been filed over DOGE s work which has included deep cuts at federal agencies and large-scale layoffs Hollander determined that DOGE s efforts at Social Safety amounted to a fishing expedition based on little more than suspicion of fraud Her order does allow staffers to access statistics that has been made anonymous but the Trump administration has revealed DOGE can t work effectively with those restrictions Elizabeth Laird with the nonprofit group Center for Democracy and Device noted wide-ranging access to sensitive personal input poses a serious threat If DOGE gets a hold of this information it opens the floodgates on a host of possible harms It also normalizes a very dangerous practice for other federal agencies she declared The nation s court system has been ground zero for pushback to President Donald Trump s sweeping conservative agenda with about lawsuits filed challenging policies on everything from immigration to schooling to mass layoffs of federal workers Among those that have reached the Supreme Court so far the justices have handed down particular largely procedural rulings siding with the administration but have rejected the executive s broad arguments in other cases
