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A federal appeals court says it won’t lift restrictions on the access that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has to Social Security systems containing personal data on millions of Americans.
The full panel of judges on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted 9-6 to keep the ruling from U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander in place while DOGE pushes forward with an appeal. The appellate decision was released Wednesday.
Earlier this month Hollander issued a preliminary injunction in the case, which was brought by a group of labor unions and retirees who allege DOGE’s recent actions violate privacy laws and present massive information security risks.
Hollander said DOGE staffers could access data that has been redacted or stripped of anything personally identifiable, but only if they undergo training and background checks. She also said DOGE and its staffers must purge any of the non-anonymized Social Security data they have already obtained, and barred them from making any changes to the computer code used by the Social Security Administration.
Attorneys representing DOGE had argued that anonymizing the data would be too burdensome, and disrupt the Trump administration’s efforts to root out any Social Security fraud.
Appellate Judge Robert B. King, writing for the majority, said DOGE wants “immediate and unfettered access” to all Social Security records, including “the highly sensitive personal information of essentially everyone in our Country,” like family court and school records, mental health and medical records of SSA disability recipients, and bank and earning information.
“All this highly sensitive information has long been handed over to SSA by the American people with every reason to believe that the information would be fiercely protected,” King wrote.
Appellate judge Julius Richardson, who voted against the majority ruling, said the case should have been handled by a smaller three-judge group rather than the full panel of active appellate judges. He also said the plaintiffs haven’t shown DOGE has actually snooped on any of their personal information, but instead are distressed by the possibility of “abstract harm.”
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