Summary:

Donald Trump’s interim Social Security chief suggested Thursday night he will effectively turn off the agency that manages the essential safety net program for seniors and the disabled, if Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) can’t access the non-anonymized sensitive personal information and data of hundreds of millions of Americans, based on a judge’s order.

“My anti-fraud team would be DOGE affiliates. My IT staff would be DOGE affiliates,” said Lee Dudek, acting Social Security Administration (SSA) commissioner, arguing the order was too broad, according to Bloomberg News. “As it stands, I will follow it exactly and terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems,” he said, adding: “Really, I want to turn it off and let the courts figure out how they want to run a federal agency.”

Dudek’s threat to block SSA employees from using the agency’s IT systems — a move that could halt Social Security payments — came in response to a judge’s temporary restraining order in a case brought by the AFL-CIO labor union. The order bars Social Security Administration officials from allowing DOGE, including Musk, and the SSA’s DOGE team to access personally identifiable information. It also directs Musk and DOGE to delete from their possession all non-anonymized personal data, and bars them from having access to SSA computers or code.

Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander wrote that the SSA had likely violated administrative and privacy laws when it gave DOGE “unbridled access to the personal and private data of millions of Americans, including but not limited to Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, hospitalization records, drivers’ license numbers, bank and credit card information, tax information, income history, work history, birth and marriage certificates, and home and work addresses.”

She added that the “defendants, with so-called experts on the DOGE Team, never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government.”