In a sharp legal rebuke, a federal judge has ordered the Social Security Administration (SSA) to immediately cut off Elon Musk’s government task force—officially called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—from sifting through the private records of millions of Americans.
The ruling, handed down by U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander, called out what she described as “unfettered access” granted to Musk’s team, slamming the intrusion as a likely breach of federal privacy laws. The judge declared that DOGE’s data hunt, carried out under the banner of rooting out fraud, was “a fishing expedition in search of a needle in a haystack—with no clear evidence the needle even exists.”
At the heart of the controversy is DOGE’s deep dive into SSA’s most sensitive data systems, including “Numident,” an internal database so rich with personal detail it’s nicknamed the agency’s “crown jewels.” The system holds information on nearly every American who has ever applied for a Social Security number—alive or dead—going back to the 1930s.
Musk’s camp had claimed they were ferreting out fraud—asserting that identities of deceased individuals were being used to siphon off government benefits. But insiders familiar with SSA operations said the mere presence of deceased individuals in legacy databases does not mean funds are being misdirected.
The judge wasn’t buying it.
“Just because fraud should be fought doesn’t mean the government gets to bulldoze the law to do it,” Hollander wrote in her opinion. She criticized SSA leadership for handing over “a massive amount” of data to DOGE with little oversight or restraint. Ten DOGE staffers, she said, had been granted carte blanche access to the records of millions.
The acting SSA chief, Leland Dudek, said the ruling was so sweeping it might apply to the agency’s own employees. “My anti-fraud team would be DOGE affiliates. My IT staff would be DOGE affiliates,” he said, signaling confusion about the scope of the court’s order. He vowed to follow the ruling to the letter—at least until further clarification.
Meanwhile, the White House fired back, calling the decision political sabotage. A spokesperson said President Trump would pursue all legal avenues to reinstate DOGE’s access and fulfill his mission of eliminating government waste.
But civil liberties advocates hailed the ruling as a landmark victory. Democracy Forward, one of the groups behind the lawsuit, celebrated the court’s demand that DOGE delete all unlawfully accessed data. “The court saw the real, immediate danger of Musk’s data grab and acted to shut it down,” said the organization’s president.
This marks the second courtroom blow to DOGE in a week. Just days earlier, a separate judge blocked Musk’s attempt to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, ruling he lacked proper authority since he hadn’t been confirmed by the Senate.
Despite pushback from multiple departments, DOGE had been operating across at least 20 federal agencies, including Health and Human Services, Labor, and Energy. While DOGE has previously been barred from Treasury’s most sensitive payment systems, Thursday’s ruling is the first to directly halt their access to such a broad swath of personal citizen data.
Judge Hollander added a final note of irony in her opinion—pointing out that DOGE members had been granted anonymity due to concerns for their own safety, while they showed no such concern for the privacy of millions of Americans whose deeply personal records they had accessed without consent.
As for the Social Security Administration’s earlier boasts of $800 million in cost savings under the DOGE initiative—those numbers may now be overshadowed by a much more pressing cost: public trust.
