WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed teams affiliated with the Department of Government Efficiency to gain access to potentially sensitive data on millions of Americans, overruling a lower court that had blocked that access in February.
By a 2-1 vote, a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted the access to data stored at the Treasury Department, the Education Department and the Office of Personnel Management, citing the Supreme Court’s decision in a similar case in June involving Social Security data.
The decision cleared the way for teams put in place this year by Elon Musk to reclaim “high-level IT access” to government databases, Judge Julius Richardson wrote, over the objections of a number of labor unions that had sued, arguing the move violated federal privacy laws.
Writing for the majority, Richardson said the circumstances of the case mirrored those in a lawsuit involving data that the Supreme Court had weighed as an emergency application this year. In an unsigned order in that case, the Supreme Court intervened to allow the DOGE analysts to continue sifting through the records “in order for those members to do their work.”
Besides sensitive financial data linked to Social Security benefits, the government regularly collects other information on residents such as addresses, employer details and related statistics that could be used to identify individual people. The decision Tuesday concerned that kind of data, as well as information on student debt stored at the Education Department, which collects personal financial data on more than 40 million borrowers.
Richardson, appointed by President Donald Trump, and Judge G. Steven Agee, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, formed the majority.
Over the course of multiple lawsuits, the Justice Department has argued that DOGE teams were directed by Trump to scrutinize federal data to screen for evidence of wasted taxpayers dollars, redundant contracts or fraud.
After several federal judges moved this year to restrict their access, the government offered a number of concessions, including agreeing to have DOGE staff undergo routine security trainings and background checks, or to limit their access to only anonymized data that could not be linked to individual people.
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