Washington – The Supreme Court cleared the road on Friday for the Doge team that had been led by Elon Musk to examine social security records that include personal information about most Americans.
Acting by a 6-3 vote, the judges granted an appeal of President Trump's lawyers and lifted a court order that had forbidden a team of Dixes Employees freely examining social security records.
“We conclude that, in the current circumstances,” the Social Security Administration, or SSA, “can proceed to provide the members of the SSA Doge team access to the agency's records in question so that these members do their job,” the court said in an unpleasant order.
In a second order, the judges blocked the dissemination of Dux operations as agency records that could be subject to the Law of Freedom of Information.
The three liberals of the Court, Judges Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, dismitted in both cases.
“Today, the Emergency Court grants relief that allows the Social Security Administration (SSA) to deliver to the duxeros to the highly confidential data of millions of Americans,” Jackson wrote. “The Government wants to give Doge access without restrictions on this personal information and not anonymized at this time, before the courts have time to evaluate whether Doge's access is legal.”
The legal struggle became the unusual status of the newly created government efficiency department. This was a non -true department, but the name given to the team of aggressive external advisors led by Musk.
Were the presidential members of Doge team members to team members or strangers who should not receive access to personal data?
While Social Security employees are entrusted with records that contain personal information, it was disputed if the 11 members of the Doge team could trust the same material.
Musk had said that the objective was to find evidence of fraud or misuse of government funds.
He and Dege were sued by labor unions that said that external analysts were examining through records with personal information protected by privacy laws. Unless it is verified, Doge's team could create highly personal computer profiles of each person, they said.
A federal judge in Maryland agreed and issued an order that restricts Doge's work.
The United States District Judge, Ellen Hollander, designated by Obama, prevented Doge employees from having access to confidential personal information of millions of Americans. But his request did not restrict Social Security personnel or Doge employees to use data that did not identify people or confidential personal information.
At the end of April, the divided Court of Appeals of the 4th Circuit refused to set aside the order of the judge in a vote of 9-6.
Judge Robert King said that “the Government has tried to grant the Government Efficiency Department (Doge) immediate and without restrictions on all records of the Social Security Administration ('SSA'), records that include highly sensitive personal information of essentially all in our country.”
But Trump's lawyer, General D. John Sauer, appealed to the Supreme Court and said a judge should not “guess” how the administration administers the government.
He said that the district judge had “ordered the employees of the private agency, the 11 members of the Doge team of the Social Security Administration (SSA), from accessing data to which other employees of the agency can undoubtedly access, and that the SSA Doge team will use for purposes that are indisputably legal … The Executive Branch, not the district courts, establishes the labor responsibilities of the government employees.”
Sauer said that Doge's team was trying to modernize SSA systems and identify inappropriate payments, for example, reviewing records of records and marking unusual payment patterns or other signs of fraud.
Doge employees “are subject to the same strict confidentiality standards as other SSA employees,” he said. In addition, the plaintiffs “do not report that the access of the SSA Doge team will increase the risk of public dissemination.”
He said that verifying personal data is crucial.
“For example, a 1900 birth date can be revealing evidence that an individual has probably died and that social security payments should not yet receive, while 15 names that use the same social security number can also point to a problem,” he said.
