Cybersecurity Policy Report, Supreme Court Urged to Retain Injunction Blocking DOGE Access to Social Security Data, (May 12, 2025)
An injunction imposed by a federal district court to block access to Social Security Administration (SSA) data by the White House Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) should remain in place to protect Americans’ privacy while the underlying case is adjudicated, the Supreme Court was told today.
“Since its founding, SSA has been committed to living up to its data security obligations,” the court was told by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Alliance for Retired Americans, and American Federation of Teachers in Social Security Administration v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, et al., No. 24A1063 (U.S. May 2, 2025).
“But in a sudden and striking departure from generations of precedent spanning more than a dozen presidential administrations, the Agency now seeks to throw open its data systems to unauthorized (and often unvetted) personnel who have no demonstrated need for the personally identifiable information (‘PII’) they seek,” according to the groups’ filing.
The injunction was originally ordered by the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland and was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (Richmond), after which U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer applied to the Supreme Court for an emergency administrative stay to reverse the injunction (CPR, May 5).
But the case doesn’t present an emergency, and the government won’t suffer irreparable harm if it remains, the groups told the court.
“As the Fourth Circuit recognized, this case presents no emergency—at least not for the Agency, which devotes just one paragraph to the irreparable harm it will allegedly suffer absent a stay,” they argued.
“Now, SSA asks this Court to get involved simply because a lower court has interfered with something the Executive Branch wants to do. But that has never been the standard for emergency relief, and the Court should not adopt it now,” they said.
On the other hand, the groups challenging DOGE access to SSA data face the prospect of privacy violations that can’t be rectified after the fact if the Supreme Court lifts the injunction, they said.
“The invasion of privacy that Respondents’ members suffer from unfettered DOGE access to this information cannot be subsequently remedied by damages,” the groups told the court. “Nor could the court adequately fashion after-the-fact relief, as the core harm stems from the invasion of privacy itself, and the attendant harms if data are compromised are apt to metastasize quickly in a way that would be difficult for a court to rectify later.”
“Each day the DOGE Team has unfettered access to non-anonymized, sensitive data at SSA, the harm compounds,” they added. “Any minor inconveniences the government may face from the limited preliminary injunction pale in comparison to the harms that will befall Respondents’ members if the preliminary injunction is lifted.”
The Fourth Circuit has agreed to consider DOGE’s appeal of the district court’s ruling en banc, with the Trump administration’s initial brief due on June 9.
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