SCOTUS gives DOGE two big wins

Ella Lee and Zach Schonfeld write for The Hill about legal wins for the federal government’s new efficiency unit.

The Supreme Court on Friday handed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) two major victories in its expanding legal battle over drastic efforts to reshape the federal bureaucracy.  

In two separate emergency rulings issued simultaneously, the court lifted a block on DOGE personnel accessing sensitive Social Security Administration (SSA) systems and wiped a ruling forcing DOGE to turn over discovery in a records lawsuit. 

Both rulings appeared to be along the Supreme Court’s ideological lines, with the court’s three Democrat-appointed justices publicly dissenting.  

The decisions come as President Trump’s relationship with billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, the face of DOGE for months, publicly imploded Thursday. His administration continues to defend DOGE’s work in the courts. 

In the Social Security case, the justices lifted a Maryland-based federal judge’s order blocking DOGE from snooping around the SSA’s systems that contain personally identifiable information, including Social Security numbers, medical and mental health records, bank data, and earnings history.  

The majority did not explain the reasoning, only saying that the “SSA may proceed to afford members of the SSA DOGE Team access to the agency record” under the present circumstances. 

In dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Stomayor, said the Trump administration hadn’t met the court’s high bar for emergency relief, accusing her colleagues of “jettisoning careful judicial decisionmaking.”  

“The Court is thereby, unfortunately, suggesting that what would be an extraordinary request for everyone else is nothing more than an ordinary day on the docket for this Administration,” Jackson wrote.  …

… The challenge to DOGE’s ability to poke around in the SSA’s systems came from a coalition of government unions, backed by the left-leaning legal group Democracy Forward, that claimed DOGE’s unfettered access to the sensitive data ran afoul of privacy laws and the SSA’s own rules and regulations. 

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