[A] Supreme Court decision issued Friday could cement DOGE’s legacy in a particularly troubling way. By a 6-3 vote, the justices have allowed DOGE to access Social Security data for all Americans while a lawsuit challenging that access proceeds.
The strong implication is that the court will ultimately find that the White House — which, in this administration, effectively means the entire executive branch — can access this data indefinitely. In practice, that means one more substantial step in the direction of turning the US into a country like China, where the government has a 360-degree view of every aspect of its citizens’ lives.
The executive order that created DOGE commanded all agencies to allow access to their data “consistent with applicable law.” The applicable law in this case is the Privacy Act. It says that agencies can only disclose personal data in narrow circumstances, such as when agency employees “have a need for the record in the performance of their duties.” Social Security Administration policy also limits employees’ data access.
Concerned about the consequences of allowing DOGE — a rapidly assembled White House unit created for Musk — access to personal information, a federal district court quickly told the Social Security Administration that it could not provide DOGE with the data. A federal appeals court agreed, and the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court, via its emergency docket, to overturn the order, which it did.
As is typical for cases in the emergency docket, the six-justice majority — all the Court’s conservatives — didn’t explain its reasoning. The bottom line, however, is that the decision signals that they expect to eventually rule in favor of granting DOGE access. Perhaps they think that DOGE has a need for the records, so the Privacy Act doesn’t apply. Or, more radically, they may think that the Privacy Act is unconstitutional when applied to stop one part of the executive branch from seeing data collected by another part.
Either way, the paucity of information available to us illustrates the increasingly bizarre world of the Supreme Court in 2025, where matters of significant national importance are being decided in the emergency docket — with reasoning that ranges from minimal to nonexistent. This is certainly no way to reach sound, thoughtful decisions. It’s an even less effective means for creating legal predictability and stability, which require reasoned precedent to guide future cases.
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