By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) – A federal judge on Monday blocked the government downsizing team created by President Donald Trump and spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk from accessing sensitive data maintained by the U.S. Education Department and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman in Greenbelt, Maryland issued the temporary restraining order at the behest of a coalition of labor unions who argued the agencies wrongly granted Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access to records containing personal information on millions of Americans.
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The judge said the plaintiffs had established that both agencies had likely violated federal law by granting DOGE “sweeping access” to sensitive personal information in violation of the Privacy Act of 1974.
That information included Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses, income and assets, citizenship status and disability status for current and former federal employees and student aid recipients.
The Trump administration had argued that a ruling blocking DOGE from accessing the information would impede the Republican president’s ability to fulfill his agenda by limiting what information his advisors can access.
But Boardman, an appointee of Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden, said her order prevents the disclosure of the plaintiffs’ sensitive personal information to DOGE affiliates who, on the current record, do not have a need to know the information to perform their duties.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
DOGE has swept through federal agencies since the Republican president returned to office last month and put the chief executive of carmaker Tesla in charge of rooting out wasteful spending as part of Trump’s dramatic overhaul of government, which has included thousands of job cuts.
Several lawsuits have been filed by Democratic-led U.S. states and liberal-leaning legal groups seeking to prevent DOGE from accessing government systems.
On Friday, a federal judge in New York at the request of 19 Democratic state attorneys general extended an order blocking DOGE from accessing Treasury Department systems responsible for trillions of dollars in government payments.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Nick Zieminski)
