Trump asks Supreme Court for DOGE access to Social Security data

Greg Stohr and Zoe Tillman, Bloomberg News on May 2, 2025

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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have access to sensitive Social Security information, escalating a privacy fight that could affect millions of people.

The administration is challenging a federal trial judge’s order blocking DOGE from having full access to personally identifiable information in the Social Security Administration database. U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander’s order also requires people affiliated with DOGE to “destroy and delete” data they’ve already acquired.

The government on Friday said the Supreme Court should lift the Baltimore-based judge’s order – restoring DOGE’s access – while the Justice Department presses an appeal. Musk’s team wants access to the data as part of President Donald Trump’s plan to weed out what he claims is wasteful spending across the federal government.

The lower court orders had stopped the administration “carrying out key policy objectives in an important federal agency for more than a month,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in the emergency application.

“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,” Sauer wrote.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals kept the DOGE ban in place Wednesday on a 9-6 vote. Writing for seven members of the majority, Judge Robert Bruce King pointed to Hollander’s findings that DOGE was seeking a level of access possessed by only a handful of top SSA officials and could conduct its work largely with anonymous and randomized data.

The disputed data includes Social Security numbers, addresses, birth and marriage certificates, tax and earnings records, employment history, and bank and credit card information.

“All this highly sensitive personal information has long been handed over to SSA by the American people with every reason to believe that the information would be fiercely protected,” King wrote.