WASHINGTON — A group of labor unions are asking a federal court for an emergency order to stop Elon Musk ‘s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing the sensitive Social Security data of millions of Americans.
The motion for emergency relief was filed late Friday in federal court in Maryland by the legal services group Democracy Forward against the Social Security Administration and its acting commissioner, Leland Dudek. The unions want the court to block DOGE’s access to the vast troves of personal data held by the agency.
Included in the filing is an affidavit from Tiffany Flick, a former senior official at the agency who says career civil servants are trying to protect the data from DOGE. “A disregard for our careful privacy systems and processes now threatens the security the data SSA houses about millions of Americans,” Flick wrote in court documents.
Karianne Jones, a lawyer for the unions and a retiree group behind the lawsuit, said it is not fully clear what kind of access that DOGE might have to personal data about taxpayers. But she said the apparent scope and the lack of information about what DOGE is looking for mean the potential impact is “huge.”
“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.
The Social Security Administration did not immediately respond to a request Saturday for comment on the lawsuit, which was originally filed last month.
DOGE’s work during the early stages of the Trump administration has drawn nearly two dozen lawsuits. Judges have raised questions in several cases about DOGE’s sweeping cost-cutting efforts, conducted with little public information about its staffing and operations. But judges have not always agreed that the risks are imminent enough to block DOGE from government systems.
Across-the-board cuts at the Social Security Administration are prompting questions about the possible effects on benefits for tens of millions of recipients.
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. It’s all part of the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce.
DOGE has accessed other government databases, including at the Treasury and IRS.
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.
In addition, a February agreement between the Office of Personnel Management and the IRS states that a DOGE employee, Gavin Kliger, would be allowed to have access to IRS systems, but not the personal information of taxpayers.
