The Trump administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to let members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have access to sensitive records of the Social Security Administration.
“This emergency application,” D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, wrote, “presents a now-familiar theme: a district court has issued sweeping injunctive relief without legal authority to do so, in ways that inflict ongoing, irreparable harm on urgent federal priorities and stymie the executive branch’s functions.”
The administration has filed a barrage of such applications in recent weeks, including one in an immigration case on Thursday. Several of them await decisions from the justices, who are also set to hear arguments on May 15 on the scope of permissible injunctions in challenges to President Trump’s efforts to do away with birthright citizenship.
Mr. Trump and his allies have complained bitterly about lower court judges who have blocked his initiatives, including by issuing injunctions that apply nationwide.
Judge Ellen L. Hollander, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, imposed strict conditions last month on access to the records in light of the agency’s “abiding commitment to the privacy and confidentiality of the personal information entrusted to it by the American people.”
Judge Hollander said the agency could provide members of the DOGE team “with access to redacted or anonymized data and records,” but only after they received training on privacy laws and policies, were subjected to background investigations and satisfied other requirements.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit rejected the administration’s request to pause the judge’s injunction while an appeal moved forward.
The Supreme Court ordered the challengers, two labor unions and an advocacy group, to respond to the administration’s application by May 12.
Mr. Sauer wrote that Judge Hollander, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, had exceeded her authority. “The district court is forcing the executive branch,” he wrote, “to stop employees charged with modernizing government information systems from accessing the data in those systems because, in the court’s judgment, those employees do not ‘need’ such access.”
He added: “The government cannot eliminate waste and fraud if district courts bar the very agency personnel with expertise and the designated mission of curtailing such waste and fraud from performing their jobs.”
In other lawsuits challenging Mr. Musk’s aggressive incursions into government records, some judges have issued similar orders barring officials from handing over sensitive data. As President Trump has pursued efforts to deport students and other foreign nationals, lawyers have argued that agencies’ data systems could be used to aid a broader immigration crackdown.
In her ruling, Judge Hollander wrote that the “intrusion into the personal affairs of millions of Americans — absent an adequate explanation for the need to do so — is not in the public interest,” especially because the agency “has long communicated to the public its commitment to privacy.
“To be sure,” she added, “rooting out possible fraud, waste and mismanagement” in the agency “is in the public interest. But, that does not mean that the government can flout the law to do so.”
Mr. Sauer told the justices that Judge Hollander should not be allowed to interfere in the executive branch’s operations.
“The district court’s flawed injunction,” Mr. Sauer wrote, “forecloses the executive branch from carrying out the pressing priorities of modernizing government information systems and ferreting out fraud, waste, and abuse — all at the behest of plaintiffs who gave their information to the agencies with the knowledge that other government employees may access their data.”
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