The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court Friday to put a hold on a lower court order that is blocking Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from gaining access to Social Security records.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the lower court ruling is hindering President Trump’s attempt to weed out waste and fraud in the federal bureaucracy.
He said U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander, an Obama appointee to the court in Maryland, made “glaring legal errors” by wading deeply into another branch of government’s internal operations. And he said the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals compounded the problem by refusing to halt her ruling while the case is being appealed.
The case is the first of a tsunami of lawsuits challenging DOGE’s access to federal systems to reach the justices, and Mr. Sauer said the high court’s guidance is needed now to set the playing field.
“The employees at issue have a ’need’ to access the records contained in the relevant systems to perform their official duties,” he argued.
DOGE has been perusing systems across the government, angering Mr. Musk’s critics who say he’s looking where he shouldn’t — and risking dissemination of private or, in some cases, secret information.
In the case of Social Security, the challengers, led by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said DOGE employees are accessing information about Social Security benefit payments.
AFSCME argues that the beneficiaries turned over their information with the expectation it would be kept private and accessed only by employees with proper authorization.
Mr. Sauer, though, said DOGE employees can’t carry out their mission without seeing payment information.
Mr. Trump, during his address to Congress in March, said Social Security has millions of people still in its systems whose ages would put them well above 100 years of age.
Mr. Sauer said the case is all the more important for the justices because the 4th Circuit, in action on a similar case about DOGE’s access to records at the Treasury and Education departments and the Office of Personnel Management, put a lower court judge’s injunction on hold.
He said the appeals court “inexplicably” came out the other way in the Social Security case.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. gave AFSCME 10 days to respond to the administration’s request for intervention.
