(Washington) The Supreme Court granted two victories on Friday to the Trump administration in cases involving the department of government efficiency, in particular by giving it access to social security systems containing personal data of millions of Americans.
The judges also restricted separately from the ordinances requiring transparency within the DOGE, the team formerly led by billionaire Elon Musk.
The conservative majority of the Court rose to the side of the Trump administration during the first appeals before the Supreme Court concerning the DOGE. The three liberal judges expressed their disagreement in both cases.
Photo Evan Vucci, Associated Press Archives
Elon Musk and Donald Trump
The Doge’s victories occur in a context of a stormy rupture between the president and the richest man in the world, who started shortly after the departure of Elon Musk from the White House and gave rise to threats to break up government contracts and a call to the dismissal of the president. The future of the works of the Doge is uncertain without Elon Musk at its head, but the two men previously declared that they would continue their efforts.
In a case, the High Court canceled an order from a Maryland judge who limited the access of the social security to the social security under federal privacy laws.
“We conclude that, in the current circumstances, the SSA can authorize the members of the DOGE team of the SSA to access the files of the agency in question so that they can do their work,” said the court in an unique order. The conservative judges of the lower courts said that there is no evidence of poor management of personal information by DOGE at this stage.
The agency holds sensitive data on almost all the citizens of the country, including school records, salary information and medical information.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said that the court’s decision creates “serious risk for privacy” of millions of Americans by granting “unlimited access to DOGE data, despite its inability to demonstrate any need or interest to comply with existing confidentiality guarantees, and all before we even know if the federal law authorizes such access. »»
Judge Sonia Sotomayor joined her opinion and Judge Elena Kagan argued that she would also have ruled against the administration.
The Trump administration says Doge needs this access to carry out its mission to combat waste within the federal government.
Elon Musk concentrated on social security, which he considered an alleged center of fraud. The entrepreneur described the “Ponzi system” program and insisted that the reduction in waste in the program was an important way to reduce public spending.
But the federal judge Ellen Hollander, of Maryland, estimated that Doge’s efforts concerning social security were equivalent to a “fishing expedition” based on “a simple suspicion” of fraud, and that unlimited access endangered private information from the Americans.
His decision authorized access to anonymous data for employees who have undergone training and history checks, or wider access for those who have expressed a specific need.
According to the Trump administration, the DOGE could not effectively work with these restrictions.
The abuse of power denounced
The Solicitor General of the United States, D. John Sauer also argued that this decision illustrates the abuse of power of the federal judges and their attempt to microchip the agencies of the executive power.
The complainants claim that this is a restrictive prescription, necessary to protect personal information.
A court of appeal had previously refused to immediately remove the blocking of access to Doge, despite ideological divisions. The minority conservative judges said that there was no evidence that the team made “targeted spy” or disclosed personal information.
The complaint was initially filed by a group of unions and retirees represented by the association Democracy Forward. It is part of around twenty complaints against the work of the DOGE, which has notably led to large budget cuts in federal agencies and massive layoffs.
The American judicial system was the starting point for the resistance to the vast conservative program of President Donald Trump, with around 200 complaints disputed contesting policies in fields as varied as immigration, education and massive layoffs of federal officials.
In the other DOGE ordinance made on Friday, the judges extended the suspension of the orders forcing the team to publicly disclose information on its activities, as part of a complaint filed by a government surveillance group. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) maintains that the DOGE, which has played a central role in the will of Donald Trump to reshape the government, is a federal agency and must be subject to the law on freedom of information (foia).
But the Trump administration affirms that the DOGE is only a presidential advisory body aimed at reducing public spending, which would exempt it from requests for documents under the foia.
The judges did not rule on this issue on Friday, but the conservative majority considered that the district judge Christopher Cooper had ruled too broadly by ordering the delivery of documents to Crew.
The journalists of the Associated Press Mark Sherman and Chris Megerian contributed to this report
