A federal judge in Maryland blocked the Social Security Administration from giving Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency access to any SSA system containing personally identifiable information.
In a temporary restraining order issued March 20, U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander blocked DOGE from gaining access to SSA records and ordered DOGE and its team members to disgorge and delete all nonanonymized personal information in their possession.
In addition, she blocked DOGE from installing any software on SSA information systems and accessing, altering or disclosing any SSA computer or software code.
The order comes nearly four weeks after the Alliance for Retired Americans, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO sued the Social Security Administration for allegedly abandoning its commitment to maintaining the privacy of personal data provided to the agency by millions of Americans.
The plaintiffs filed the suit against its acting commissioner Leland Dudek and chief information officer Michael Russo as well as Elon Musk, the de facto head of DOGE, and Amy Gleason, DOGE’s acting administrator. The suit also named the U.S. DOGE Service and the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization as defendants.
The suit attacked the SSA for opening its data systems to unauthorized personnel and blasted the White House for its “breathtaking disregard for the legal protections Congress and the executive branch implemented to protect data belonging to or pertaining to individual Americans.”
In a White House statement, Deputy Press Secretary Harrison Fields accused the judge of abusing the judicial system.
“In an 134-page decision, a radical leftist-judge ordered social security administration employees not to implement the president’s government-efficiency agenda,” Fields said in the statement. “This is yet another activist judge abusing the judicial system to try and sabotage the president’s attempts to rid the government of waste, fraud and abuse. The president will continue to seek all legal remedies available to ensure the will of the American people goes into effect.”
The judge ordered the defendants to file a status report by March 24 documenting the actions they have taken to comply with the order, including certifying that defendants will not be provided SSA records access unless they have received proper training.
“We have received the court order, and we will comply,” a press officer for the SSA said in a statement.
In her opinion, Hollander faulted the SSA for providing members of the SSA DOGE team with “unbridled access to the personal and private data of million of Americans.”
“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,” she said.
The temporary restraining order expires in 14 days from when it was entered into the court system.
