A federal appeals court on Tuesday gave the Department of Government Efficiency the green light to access personally identifying information affecting millions of Americans at multiple federal agencies, overturning a previous ruling made by a lower court earlier this year.
The 2-1 opinion comes after a district court judge in Maryland barred the Office of Personnel Management, the Education Department and the Treasury Department from disclosing to any DOGE affiliates the identifying information of members of the several labor unions who sued, as well as six military veterans who had received benefits or student loans from the government.
Now, DOGE teams detailed to each agency have legal clearance to the “high-level IT access” — as Judge Julius Richardson characterized it in the majority opinion — that an executive order from President Donald Trump in January had demanded agencies provide.
Richardson wrote that the plaintiffs, including the American Federation of Teachers, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and the National Federation of Federal Employees, could not receive a preliminary injunction because they failed to satisfy a test that would measure their success in court.
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“Our full consideration these last few months has only deepened our preexisting concerns with Plaintiffs’ likelihood of success. The number of obstacles Plaintiffs must surmount remains unchanged, and further briefing has only highlighted their arguments’ weaknesses. We thus hold that the district court abused its discretion in concluding that Plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits,” Richardson wrote.
He also noted the similarities between the case and another heard by the Supreme Court earlier this year.
The high court ruled in that case, Social Security Administration v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, that DOGE should be given access to sensitive personal information for millions of Americans held by the Social Security Administration.
Judge Robert King was the lone dissent on Tuesday.
“Just in early February 2025, the district court found itself confronted with this matter of immense urgency and import: the President’s new Department of Government Efficiency, or ‘DOGE,’ had been accorded sudden, unfettered, unprecedented, and apparently unnecessary access to highly sensitive personal information belonging to millions of Americans and entrusted to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Department of Education, and Office of Personnel Management,” King wrote.
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