The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines to restore DOGE's access to Social Security Administration data, striking down the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that had enjoined SSA from granting DOGE personnel access to personally identifiable information. The conservative supermajority overturned months of lower court protections that had blocked DOGE from accessing Social Security numbers, medical records, tax information, and bank records of hundreds of millions of Americans.
In a companion case, U.S. DOGE Service v. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Court also exempted DOGE from responding to Freedom of Information Act requests regarding its recommendations to the president. The three liberal justices dissented. The twin rulings effectively dismantled the judicial guardrails that lower courts had erected around DOGE's data access, granting the Musk-led operation broad authority to access some of the most sensitive personal data held by the federal government. Privacy experts warned the decision set a dangerous precedent for government handling of citizen data.