One feature unique to preliminary injunctions looms large in this case: “that the plaintiff must show a likelihood of success on the merits rather than actual success.”
We do not hold with certainty that Plaintiffs lack standing, that they have not challenged final agency action, that they cannot sue under the APA, or that the DOGE affiliates’ IT access falls into the Privacy Act’s need-to-know exception. We instead come to a statistically surer conclusion: that Plaintiffs have failed, by a decent margin, to show that they will likely prevail on all of these issues combined. The district court abused its discretion in finding that Plaintiffs were likely to prevail on each one, and with such certainty that they were likely to succeed overall. The district court’s order granting Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction is vacated, and the case is remanded to the district court for further proceedings.
Lambert here: I don’t know if the reasoning is ingenious, motivated, or what. But see footnote 8.
8 Despite this, there in fact seems to be a decent degree of granularity in some of the justifications given. In Krause’s request for Treasury IT systems access, for example, the agency record shows that he was starting a project to “ensure that all payments through [Bureau of Fiscal Service] BFS’s payment systems included Treasury Account Symbols (TAS) and Business Event Type Codes (BETCs),” and that this project, along with others, “required review of the source code for BFS’s payment systems and databases across multiple BFS payment systems as well as the ability to review sensitive payment data.” D.Ct. Dkt No. 27-1 ⁋ 14–15.
Lambert here: Presumably so DOGE can stop checks on the output side?
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