A federal judge is blocking the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing personal data from three federal agencies in the latest injunction against the Trump administration.
U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman wrote in a ruling Monday that the U.S. Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Treasury Department are prohibited “from disclosing the personally identifiable information of the plaintiffs and the members of the plaintiff organizations to any DOGE affiliates, defined as individuals whose principal role is to implement the DOGE agenda as described in Executive Order 14, 158 and who were granted access to agency systems of records for the principal purpose of implementing that agenda.”
“No matter how important or urgent the President’s DOGE agenda may be, federal agencies must execute it in accordance with the law,” she wrote. “That likely did not happen in this case. The plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction is granted.”
Boardman’s ruling is in response to a lawsuit filed by “unions and membership organizations representing current and former federal employees and federal student aid recipients and six military veterans who have received federal benefits or student loans.”
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“On the first day of his second term in office, President Trump signed an Executive Order directing agencies to ‘take all necessary steps… to the maximum extent consistent with law, to ensure’ people implementing his DOGE agenda have ‘full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,’” she said in her opinion.
“Following this directive, Education, OPM, and Treasury granted expansive access to their systems of record – which house the plaintiffs’ personally identifiable information – to individuals charged with implementing the President’s DOGE Executive Order,” she continued.
“In doing so, the agencies likely violated the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. Enacted 50 years ago, the Privacy Act protects from unauthorized disclosure the massive amounts of personal information that the federal government collects from large swaths of the public,” Boardman added.
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“Congress’s concern back then was that ‘every detail of our personal lives can be assembled instantly for use by a single bureaucrat or institution’ and that ‘a bureaucrat in Washington or Chicago or Los Angeles can use his organization’s computer facilities to assemble a complete dossier of all known information about an individual.’ Those concerns are just as salient today,” she also said.
As of last week, dozens of activist and legal groups, elected officials, local jurisdictions and individuals have launched more than 120 lawsuits against the Trump administration since Jan. 20 in response to his more than 90 executive orders, as well as executive proclamations and memos, Fox News Digital found.
Fox News’ Emma Colton contributed to this report.
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