Nearly a dozen lawsuits allege that DOGE’s access to government systems violates federal privacy and record-handling laws.
In its brief existence, the Elon Musk–helmed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has proved remarkably effective at one thing: attracting lawsuits.
Over the past several weeks, dozens of lawsuits have been filed challenging every aspect of the new initiative and its activities.
A handful of these lawsuits argue that the very existence of DOGE is illegal and that Musk’s role as a non–Senate confirmed “special government employee” with massive authority to set policy is unconstitutional.
By installing Musk and his DOGE team at the former U.S. Digital Service, President Donald Trump has “transformed a minor position that was formerly responsible for managing government websites into a designated agent of chaos without limitation and in violation of the separation of powers”, reads a lawsuit filed by 14 Democratic state attorneys general yesterday.
On the other end of the spectrum are the numerous lawsuits that challenge the government-slashing fruits of DOGE: the cancellation of various grants, the partial closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development and dismissal of staffers there, the Trump administration’s “fork in the road” deferred resignation program for federal workers, and more.
Sitting in between these two types of lawsuits is yet another set of complaints that challenges DOGE’s access to the basic digital infrastructure of government, including the U.S. Treasury Department’s payment systems and government personnel data held by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
Just Security’s litigation tracker lists eight lawsuits challenging DOGE’s access to government data, and that appears to be an undercount.
While this third bucket of lawsuits might sound mundane, it likely represents the biggest threat to DOGE’s work.
Plaintiffs in these records access lawsuits allege that DOGE’s access to record systems is enabling the administration’s other lawless activity, like illegally stopping grant payments and “deleting” whole agencies without congressional approval.
Musk himself has said that DOGE’s access to things like Treasury payment systems is essential to his mission of rooting out fraud and overpayments and whittling down the federal budget deficit.
Whether or not the billionaire’s role in the government is constitutional won’t mean much if DOGE is still locked out of real access to federal agency data. Whether the DOGE-inspired cuts to federal spending and staffing can stick is downstream of whether DOGE has enough information to identify payments and personnel worthy of the chopping block.
DOGE’s fiercest critics and its most ardent cheerleaders seem to think that access to government data is where the action is at.
Five former Democratic Treasury secretaries argued in The New York Times that giving political appointees and DOGE staffers who “lack training and experience” access to payment systems typically handled by career civil servants is “corrosive to our democracy.”
More positively, Samuel Hammond of the Foundation for American Innovation argued in a late January essay that DOGE’s inserting into the government’s core I.T. systems offered an opportunity for an FDR-style remaking of the federal government that, if successful, “will bring unprecedented transparency to federal spending while laying the infrastructure needed for a significant downsizing in the federal workforce through automations.”
While a number of the records access lawsuits raise deeper legal and constitutional claims, their primary complaint is that DOGE staffers and other Trump administration appointees were given access to government data without following the proper notice and procedural requirements contained in a long list of federal privacy statutes.
