DOGE lawsuits: 11 cases about Musk group focus on data, privacy
The lawsuits and the privacy claims have quickly become some of the few substantive challenges to DOGE and its ability to fully operate thrown up by critics.
As Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has promoted cuts across the federal government, it has remained quiet about a central tenet of its work: access to personal, sensitive data on millions of Americans. But among critics and legal challengers, the issue of DOGE’s data access has become paramount.
Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and President Donald Trump’s largest campaign donor, has framed DOGE as a tech-forward attempt to reduce the federal deficit. Key to his effort is a small army of acolytes, most prominently young men with backgrounds in tech, being dispatched across government agencies and demanding access to databases that are usually only available to a small number of regulated and trained employees at each agency.
The issue has spurred at least 11 lawsuits that claim DOGE has illegally accessed significant swaths of Americans’ personal information. All claim that DOGE has violated the Privacy Act of 1974, passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal and President Richard Nixon’s resignation, which heavily regulates what information about American citizens federal agencies can store and who can access that information.
The lawsuits and the privacy claims have quickly become substantive challenges to DOGE and its ability to fully operate, and represent attempts by critics to slow DOGE’s actions in certain cases, at least temporarily.
At the Education Department, plaintiffs say students’ information was gathered through student loan applications. At the Treasury Department, plaintiffs allege that DOGE accessed systems that reveal Americans’ private tax information. (NBC News has confirmed that a DOGE employee at the IRS is expected to seek access to the agency’s Integrated Data Retrieval System, which agency employees use to access taxpayer accounts.)
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