Judge blocks Elon Musk’s Doge from accessing social security records

To be sure, rooting out possible fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the SSA is in the public interest. But, that does not mean that the government can flout the law to do so,

the ruling stated

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,

spokesman Harrison Fields said

My anti-fraud team would be DOGE affiliates. My IT staff would be DOGE affiliates,

Dudek said

We will work to comply with the court order,

the spokesperson said, before Dudek's comments were reported

Ellen Lipton Hollanderjudge

It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack,

Hollander said

Why are there 20 million people who are definitely dead marked as alive in the Social Security database? Why were hundreds of hundreds of millions of dollars of Small Business Administration loans given out to people aged 11 and under, according to the Social Security data

he questioned during a recent Fox Business interview

The unrestricted access to PII that SSA provided to the DOGE Team, without specified need, and/or without adequate training, detail agreements, and/or background investigations of all DOGE Team members,

she wrote, using abbreviations for personally identifiable information and the Social Security Administration,

The expectation of privacy shared by plaintiffs’ members is objectively reasonable. It is almost self-evident that, in our society, PII, such as SSNs, medical information, and certain financial records, are regarded as private, sensitive, and confidential information.”

She added

The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,

Hollander wrote

Defendants have not submitted declarations from the hired experts on the DOGE Team explaining why such unrestricted and unfettered access is necessary,

she wrote

The overall goal” of the DOGE team inside Social Security “is to detect fraud, waste and abuse,

according to a sworn statement from the agency’s chief technology officer Michael Russo

The defense does not appear to share a privacy concern for the millions of Americans whose [Social Security] records were made available to the DOGE affiliates, without their consent, and which contain sensitive, confidential, and personally identifiable information,

she wrote

Indeed, the government has not even attempted to explain why a more tailored, measured, titrated approach is not suitable to the task,

she said

Ellen Lipton Hollanderjudge

In granting the DOGE Team access to records in the manner alleged, SSA veered far from principles that have been the mainstay of the Agency, ... They have not provided a particularized explanation of how or why virtually the entire database of SSA is needed to conduct the investigation, or why redacted or anonymized records, at least initially, would be inadequate. The silence on this issue is deafening.”

Hollander wrote, adding

Ironically, the identity of these DOGE affiliates has been concealed because defendants are concerned that the disclosure of even their names would expose them to harassment and thus invade their privacy,

the judge wrote