A group of labor unions are asking a federal court for an emergency order to stop Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing Social Security data for millions of Americans.
The motion was filed late Friday in a federal court in Maryland by the legal services group Democracy Forward against the Social Security Administration and its commissioner, Leland Dudek, the Associated Press reports.
It remains unclear what kind of access DOGE has on personal data, Karianne Jones, a lawyer for the unions and a retiree group behind the lawsuit, said. But the apparent scope and the lack of information about what the initiative is looking for means the potential impact is "huge," she suggests.
"Essentially what you have is DOGE just swooping in and bullying their way into access to millions of Americans' private data. They cannot explain why they want this data. They can't really tell you what data they want. They just want everything. They want the source code, and they want to do it without any restrictions," she said.
Former senior officials at the agency, Tiffany Flick, said in an affidavit, that career civil servants are trying to protect the data from DOGE. "A disregard for our careful privacy systems and processes now threatens the security of the data SSA houses about millions of Americans," Flick wrote in court documents.
Efforts by DOGE to access "personally identifiable information" were first reported in late-February. The Social Security administration was not the only agency targeted, in fact, so were the IRS, the Office of Personnel Management, Department of Treasury and other agencies. The Trump administration has said generally that the efforts are aimed at eliminating what it claims is waste and fraud.
On Friday, a federal judge in Washington refused to block DOGE employees from accessing Treasury systems containing sensitive personal data for millions of people. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly did acknowledge privacy concerns about that work. DOGE is still limited by a different court order in New York.
The lawsuit is the latest in a movement to counter DOGE's sweeping changes. Just last week, nearly half of the country's attorneys general sued the Trump administration over the department's mass firings of federal workers.
The AGs accuse the administration of terminating tens of thousands of probationary employees without first following federal regulations, including a 60-day advance notice to affected employees and states. The federal government and many states require companies to notify employees ahead of mass layoffs.
Among the potential changes at the agency are layoffs for more than 10% of the workforce and the closure of dozens of offices throughout the country.
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