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A federal judge has temporarily blocked Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency from their “fishing expedition” in search of a “fraud epidemic” based on “little more than suspicion” inside the Social Security Administration.
A temporary restraining order from District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander prevents the world’s wealthiest man and his team of 10 at Social Security — which Musk has baselessly labeled a “Ponzi scheme” and accused of handing out tens of billions of dollars in retirement benefits to dead people — from “unfettered” access to personal information for millions of Americans.
U.S. DOGE Service employees at the nation’s retirement and disability agency currently have access to Social Security data or “personally identifiable information,” government lawyers said this month.
Their level of access “provides no avenues” to change beneficiary data or payments, but gives them the ability to “review records needed to detect fraud,” lawyers wrote in court filings March 12.
DOGE supporters may be applauding Donald Trump’s mission “to root out fraud, waste, and bloat from federal agencies, including [Social Security], to the extent it exists. But, by what means and methods?” Judge Hollander wrote Thursday.
“The DOGE team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at [the agency], in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion. It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack,” she added.
The team has “unbridled access to the personal and private data of millions of Americans,” but has “never identified or articulated even a single reason” why DOGE would need “unlimited access” to Social Security’s entire record systems, which would risk “exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government,” the judge wrote in her ruling.
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“Indeed, the government has not even attempted to explain why a more tailored, measured, titrated approach is not suitable to the task,” she said. “Its method of doing so is tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer.”
She noted the irony of the government fighting to conceal the identities of DOGE staff “because defendants are concerned that the disclosure of even their names would expose them to harassment and thus invade their privacy.”
“The defense does not appear to share a privacy concern for the millions of Americans whose [Social Security] records were made available to the DOGE affiliates, without their consent, and which contain sensitive, confidential, and personally identifiable information,” she wrote.
The ruling is a “major win for working people and retirees across the country,” according to Lee Saunders, president of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which sued the administration over DOGE’s access to Social Security.
“The court saw that Elon Musk and his unqualified lackeys present a grave danger to Social Security and have illegally accessed the data of millions of Americans,” Saunders said. “This decision will not only force them to delete any data they have currently saved, but it will also block them from further sharing, accessing or disclosing our Social Security information.”
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The DOGE team at Social Security includes four “special government employees” and six people detailed to the agency from other offices. Officials at the agency declined to name the employees “to protect the privacy of these individuals, and to avoid exposing them to threats and harassment,” according to a sworn statement from deputy commissioner Florence Felix-Lawson.
A political appointee, a software engineer and “experts” are reviewing Social Security’s “death master file” to find payments to dead Americans, Felix-Lawson wrote.
“The overall goal” of the DOGE team inside Social Security “is to detect fraud, waste and abuse,” according to a sworn statement from the agency’s chief technology officer Michael Russo. “This level of access ensures these employees can review records needed to detect fraud but does not allow them the ability to make any changes to beneficiary data or payment files.”
Trump and administration officials have repeatedly suggested looming cuts to Social Security as well as federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid in an attempt to justify significant cuts to federal spending.
The president and Musk have amplified baseless claims that tens of millions of dead Americans are collecting Social Security checks, which, according to Trump, “if you take all of those numbers off, because they’re obviously fraudulent, or, incompetent, but if you take all of those millions of people off Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security,” he told supporters in Miami last month.
Any meaningful reduction of government spending to cut the budget by trillions of dollars would require some combination of severe cuts to expensive but critical government programs like Social Security, as well as the Department of Defense.
