Supreme Court approves DOGE access to Social Security data

The Supreme Court gave the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) the greenlight to access Social Security Administration (SSA) data on Friday.

The Trump administration asked the justices in May to pause a district court judge’s preliminary injunction preventing the SSA DOGE team from accessing certain records.

“We conclude that, under the present circumstances, SSA may proceed to afford members of the SSA DOGE Team access to the agency records in question in order for those members to do their work,” the court’s order states.

Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor would have denied the request.

Jackson, in a dissent joined by Sotomayor, wrote that the majority is “jettisoning careful judicial decisionmaking and creating grave privacy risks for millions of Americans in the process.”

“I would proceed without fear or favor to require DOGE and the Government to do what all other litigants must do to secure a stay from this Court: comply with lower court orders constraining their behavior unless and until they establish that irreparable harm will result such that equity requires a different course,” Jackson wrote.

In a separate order, the Supreme Court also halted a lower court’s discovery order that would have required DOGE to turn over some material to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which sued to force DOGE to comply with its Freedom of Information Act request.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

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