By Sam Dorman
Contributing Writer
An appeals court has removed a block imposed on the Department of Government Efficiency accessing data within various federal departments.
In a 2-1 decision on Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said the judge who issued the block erred in weighing how likely it was that the plaintiffs would succeed in their ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration.
The decision marked a win for the administration, which has encountered a wave of lawsuits related to DOGE’s activities within the federal government. The agency was set up in February under the temporary direction of tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, whom Trump designated as a special government employee, to identify wasteful spending and inefficiencies within the federal government.
Fourth Circuit Judge Julius Richardson said that in this particular lawsuit, the plaintiffs were unlikely to succeed in proving they had standing or that DOGE’s activities violated federal law. He compared DOGE to a consultant tasked with improving the efficiency of a local library.
“Barring the consultant at the library doors and requiring her to specify the precise records she needs to improve the library before she knows what improvements are needed would seem to get the order of operations precisely backward,” he said.
DOGE, also known as the U.S. DOGE Service, was set up by President Donald Trump to modernize “federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” It includes an overarching agency along with DOGE-affiliated employees working within departments like the Treasury Department.
In February, a group of individuals and unions sued the administration, alleging that DOGE was “steamrolling into sensitive government record systems” and compromising the safety and security of Americans’ personal information.
U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman eventually issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Treasury Department from disclosing the plaintiffs’ information to any DOGE affiliates, whom she described as individuals tasked with implementing Trump’s executive order.
According to Richardson’s opinion, Boardman’s order effectively paused DOGE activities within the three federal entities, although the appeals court had quickly intervened with a temporary block on that order.
Months later, the Supreme Court weighed in on a similar case and lifted a lower court order blocking DOGE from accessing confidential data at the Social Security Administration. Richardson said that case and the one before him were “exceedingly similar.”
Plaintiffs in both cases alleged violations of the Privacy Act, a federal law that restricts how government agencies can share personal information. One of the exceptions in the law allows disclosure to agency employees who have a need for the particular record in the performance of their duties.
Boardman had said that the administration likely violated this law, stating that the record before her hadn’t shown why their access was necessary.
“Here, the need-to-know exception has been invoked to defend the disclosure of millions of records,” she said, describing DOGE’s access to the Education Department as “seemingly unfettered.”
Richardson disagreed on Tuesday.
“To insist that the DOGE affiliates explain in advance the exact information they need and why is to demand something just short of clairvoyance,” he said.
“So it does not stretch the imagination to think that an employee tasked with modernizing an agency’s software and IT systems would require administrator-level access to those systems, including any internal databases, especially when conducting the initial survey of the agency’s technological ailments.”
He saw several other flaws with the plaintiffs’ case, including that they likely didn’t have standing to sue the administration.
Judge Robert King dissented from the appeals court’s decision and defended Boardman’s order, stating that she “did exactly what [she] was obliged to do.”
The Supreme Court was relatively brief in its decision on June 6 that lifted a block on DOGE’s access to the Social Security Administration. However, three liberal justices said they would have denied the administration’s request for relief in that case. A dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson echoed Boardman’s claim about DOGE’s reach.
Matthew Vadum contributed to this report.
