U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander in Maryland issued a temporary restraining order blocking DOGE personnel from accessing personally identifiable information at the Social Security Administration. The lawsuit, filed by a coalition of unions and retirees on February 21, alleged that DOGE's push to obtain SSA data violated federal privacy laws and jeopardized the security of confidential records for hundreds of millions of Americans.
The TRO was issued after revelations that DOGE engineer Aram Moghaddassi had written to SSA officials on March 15 demanding access to "detailed immigration status for non-citizen SSNs to detect fraud and improper payments." The court found the administration had failed to demonstrate that DOGE personnel had proper authorization or had completed required privacy training. DOGE was later found to have potentially violated this order, with SSA identifying communications and data use by DOGE team members that were "potentially outside of SSA policy and/or noncompliant" with the TRO. The order was superseded by a more comprehensive preliminary injunction on April 17.