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-to-1 vote, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit 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 I.T. access” to government databases, Judge Julius N. Richardson wrote, over the objections of a number of labor unions who had sued, arguing the move violated federal privacy laws.
Writing for the majority, Judge 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.”
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.
But as those cases have been appealed, the Supreme Court and appellate judges have more consistently sided with the government in allowing members of DOGE largely unfettered access to government systems.
Even after Mr. Musk stepped down from his role atop DOGE in May, the unit has continued to operate largely out of public view in what critics have described as a mission to hasten the downsizing of federal agencies and a reduction of the government’s services.
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