United States District Judge Ellen Hollander ruled on Thursday that billionaire and entrepreneur Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is temporarily barred from accessing the Social Security Administration's (SSA) personally identifiable information (PII).
A president's "advisors and employees are not exempt from the statutes Congress enacted to protect American citizens from overbroad and unnecessary access to their PII," the judge said in the order, adding that "the DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion."
The judge further stated that the experts on the DOGE team didn't provide "a single reason" why they need "unlimited access" to SSA's entire record systems.
