The Supreme Court has granted the Trump administration’s urgent bid for Department of Government Efficiency personnel to access sensitive Social Security data.
The three Democratic appointees dissented, with Justice Elena Kagan merely noting she would’ve denied the administration’s application, while Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Jackson criticized the majority for intervening as it has done in other cases recently. She wrote that, “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.”
The order came down alongside another one favoring DOGE in a case related to the Freedom of Information Act, from which the three Democratic appointees also dissented.
In this Social Security case, U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander had blocked access pending further litigation. She wrote in a lengthy ruling April 17 that the administration couldn’t justify granting DOGE members access to Americans’ personal information, notwithstanding the stated goal of rooting out fraud and promoting efficiency.
“This intrusion into the personal affairs of millions of Americans — absent an adequate explanation for the need to do so — is not in the public interest,” the Obama-appointed judge in Maryland wrote. She said the Social Security Administration could still give DOGE members access to redacted or anonymized records, so long as anyone accessing that data is properly trained and vetted.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit declined to halt Hollander’s injunction, and the government brought an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court. The government has frequently filed such appeals in President Donald Trump’s second term, as judges find legal issues with various aspects of his agenda.
Trump’s solicitor general, John Sauer, wrote that his emergency application “presents a now-familiar theme: a district court has issued sweeping injunctive relief without legal authority to do so, in ways that inflict ongoing, irreparable harm on urgent federal priorities and stymie the Executive Branch’s functions.” When it comes to this Social Security case specifically, Sauer said 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.”
Opposing emergency relief were the plaintiffs who brought the case and secured the preliminary injunction — labor unions and an advocacy group for retired Americans. They said the administration made “a sudden and striking departure from generations of precedent spanning more than a dozen presidential administrations,” by seeking to “throw open its data systems to unauthorized (and often unvetted) personnel who have no demonstrated need for the personally identifiable information (‘PII’) they seek.” They said the administration wanted high court relief “simply because a lower court has interfered with something the Executive Branch wants to do.” But they said that “has never been the standard for emergency relief, and the Court should not adopt it now.” Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
Latest Post
Recommended
