The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to pause a lower court’s order restricting affiliates of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing sensitive Social Security Administration data, arguing in a Friday filing that the judicial order limits President Donald Trump’s executive authority.
“This emergency application presents a now-familiar theme,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote. “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.”
Sauer urged the court to lift an injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander blocking DOGE from accessing the data, which includes Social Security numbers, medical records and tax and banking information.
While the Supreme Court considers a more permanent stay, the Trump administration is seeking an immediate pause on Hollander’s order arguing that the order prevents the Musk-led agency from carrying out its stated function of detecting waste and fraud, describing that effort as “time sensitive.”
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“The district court’s flawed injunction 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. The district court has now blocked these time-sensitive efforts for over a month, without any legal basis for doing so,” he wrote.
Earlier this week, the full Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Trump administration’s request for a stay in this matter.
In a 9-6 decision, the panel backed the district court’s decision to block DOGE from accessing the highly personal data.
Hollander’s opinion, the appeals court wrote, “emphasizes that all this highly sensitive personal information has long been handed over to SSA by the American people with every reason to believe that the information would be fiercely protected.”
The panel also said the government has yet to prove that DOGE is unable to complete its work with the anonymized and redacted data it currently has access to.
“The evidentiary record establishes no need for such access; rather, the evidence demonstrates that DOGE’s work could be accomplished largely with anonymized and redacted data, along with discrete pieces of non-anonymized data in limited, appropriate circumstances — as has long been typical at SSA for the type of technology upgrades and waste, abuse, and fraud detection that DOGE claims to be doing,” the appeals court wrote.
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