Federal Judge Blocks DOGE From Social Security Data, Orders Deletion of Personal Records

U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander in Maryland granted a preliminary injunction barring DOGE staffers from accessing non-anonymized personal data at the Social Security Administration, superseding a temporary restraining order issued in March. Her opinion held that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claims that the agency’s actions violated the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. NPR reported that at the temporary-restraining-order stage she had called DOGE’s methods “tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer.”

The order barred the agency from giving DOGE access to systems containing personally identifiable information, which it defined to include Social Security numbers, medical and mental health records, bank records, tax information and family court records. DOGE and its affiliates were ordered to disgorge and delete all non-anonymized personally identifiable information they had obtained from SSA systems since the start of the administration, and were barred from installing software on SSA systems.

What happened to the injunction

• Stayed, not overturned. On June 6, 2025 the Supreme Court granted the government’s application for a stay, writing that SSA “may proceed to afford members of the SSA DOGE Team access to the agency records in question.” A stay suspends an order while the case continues; it is not a ruling that the injunction was wrong.
• Vacated on irreparable harm only. On April 10, 2026 the Fourth Circuit, sitting en banc, vacated the preliminary injunction and returned the case to the district court, “without addressing whether plaintiffs satisfy the remaining three Winter factors.” The ground was that the plaintiffs had not shown likely irreparable harm. The court did not hold that SSA’s data access was lawful, and it did not reach the merits.