Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, SUPREME COURT NEWS—Administration heads to SCOTUS after appeals court declines to allow DOGE access to SSA records, (May 5, 2025)

By Brandi O. Brown, J.D.

SSA had attempted to give DOGE “immediate and unfettered access” to all SSA records, but the district court’s orders prevented that.

Members of the Trump administration have applied for a stay by the U.S. Supreme Court following the decision of the Fourth Circuit, sitting en banc, to deny their request that it stay, pending appeal, a district court’s preliminary injunction which had, along with a TRO, barred DOGE’s access to SSA records.

According to the arguments presented by SSA and other defendants (including Elon Musk, U.S. DOGE Service, and others), they believe they are likely to succeed on the merits and that the factors weigh in favor of relief. They claim that the plaintiffs, who include the AFSCME, the AFL-CIO and others, “suffer no cognizable Article III injury based on which government employees access their data.” They also argue that AFSCME, AFL-CIO, and the other plaintiffs do not challenge any final agency action and that their Privacy Act and APA claims fail on the merits.

“This case justifies this Court’s intervention, because the district court made glaring legal errors in the course of halting high-priority functions within a key agency,” they argue. “The pendency of this injunction imposes ever-mounting irreparable harm as the district court continues to commandeer basic functions of the Executive Branch. The injunction expresses the district court’s view that the Executive Branch cannot correct well-documented problems with its technological systems and combat fraud, waste, and abuse in federal programs using the personnel the Executive Branch has deemed most suited for the task.”

The docket is No. 24A1063.

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