The Department of Government Efficiency approach’s to identifying fraud at the Social Security Administration “is tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer,” a federal judge said Thursday, blocking DOGE’s unlimited access to sensitive agency data.
In a 137-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander wrote the Trump administration never justified the need to access the data — which they argued was vital to identifying alleged fraud — and likely violated multiple federal laws in doing so.
“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 wrote.
Elon Musk looks on during the day of a meeting with House Republicans to discuss the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Capitol Hill in Washington, Mar. 5, 2025.
Kent Nishimura/Reuters
The judge’s order blocks the agency from granting DOGE access to systems containing personally identifiable information and orders DOGE members to destroy any data in their possession that identifies individual taxpayers. However, the judge’s decision allows DOGE to continue to allow access anonymized data from the agency.
According to Hollander, the decision to give DOGE “unlimited access to SSA’s entire record system” endangered the sensitive and private information of millions of Americans, risking information including Social Security numbers, credit card information, medical and mental health records, hospitalization records, marriage and birth certificates, and bank information.
“The government has not even attempted to explain why a more tailored, measured, titrated approach is not suitable to the task,” she wrote. “Instead, the government simply repeats its incantation of a need to modernize the system and uncover fraud. Its method of doing so is tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer.”
Two people enter a Social Security Administration office in suburban Detroit, March 7, 2025.
Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The lawsuit challenging DOGE’s access was filed last month by two national unions and an advocacy group who argued DOGE’s access violated privacy laws and the Administrative Procedures Act. In a statement to ABC News, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees celebrated the decision as a “major win for working people and retirees across the country.”
“The court saw that Elon Musk and his unqualified lackeys present a grave danger to Social Security and have illegally accessed the data of millions of Americans,” AFSCME President Lee Saunders said in a statement.
In her decision, the judge also pointed out the irony that DOGE has accessed the sensitive information of millions of Americans while the identities of the DOGE employees working in the SSA have been concealed for privacy reasons.
“The defense does not appear to share a privacy concern for the millions of Americans whose SSA records were made available to the DOGE affiliates, without their consent,” she wrote.
