A district court judge’s block on DOGE from accessing personally identifiable information housed in Office of Personnel Management and Treasury and Education department systems was vacated by a federal appeals court panel Tuesday, opening the door for new data dives by representatives with the Elon Musk-created group.
Writing for the majority, Judge Julius Richardson, a Trump appointee, said the district court had “abused its discretion” by issuing a preliminary injunction that kept DOGE members away from OPM, Treasury and Education data.
That ruling, Richardson wrote, falsely concluded that the plaintiffs — the American Federation of Teachers, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, the National Federation of Federal Employees, and six military veterans — were likely to succeed on the merits.
Among the issues Richardson and [Judge G. Steven Agee] raised was a potential lack of standing for the plaintiffs, who they said failed to demonstrate harm that would be caused by DOGE access to their PII.
“The harm that might come from this generalized grant of database access to an additional handful of government employees — prone as they may be to hacks or leaks, as Plaintiffs have alleged — seems different in kind, not just in degree, from the harm inflicted by reporters, detectives, and paparazzi,” Richardson wrote.
The judges also took issue with plaintiffs’ contention that having their data exposed to DOGE would violate the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, citing “a dearth of case law on how the Privacy Act intersects with the APA.”
“Finally, even if Plaintiffs could overcome the threshold issues above, it appears difficult for them to establish a Privacy Act violation,” Richardson wrote. “The Privacy Act allows records to be shared intra-agency with ‘those officers and employees of the agency … who have a need for the record in the performance of their duties.’ In other words, the Privacy Act does not prohibit sharing information with those whose jobs give them good reason to access it.”
The majority also cited the Supreme Court’s June ruling involving Privacy Act and APA claims against the Social Security Administration and its DOGE liaisons, a decision that opened SSA records back up to the Musk disciples.
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