Buckle up, folks—the Supreme Court just handed the Trump administration a major win in its quest to streamline government bloat.
NBC News reported on Friday, the nation’s highest court ruled in favor of allowing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a brainchild of the Trump team, to access sensitive Social Security Administration data while simultaneously shielding it from certain transparency demands.
This saga kicked off when DOGE, established by billionaire Elon Musk before his rift with President Trump, set its sights on modernizing outdated systems and rooting out waste and fraud at the Social Security Administration.
The data in question isn’t just bureaucratic fluff—it includes Social Security numbers, medical histories, and even banking details, a treasure trove for any efficiency-minded reformer.
But not everyone’s cheering; a coalition of groups, including Democracy Forward and various unions, sued to block this access, claiming it violates privacy laws like the Privacy Act.
They cried foul with, “This ruling will enable President Trump and DOGE’s affiliates to steal Americans’ private data,” yet one wonders if their real fear is having inefficiencies exposed under a harsh spotlight.
The legal battle first hit a wall when U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander in Maryland issued an injunction against DOGE’s access, a decision upheld by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia.
Undeterred, the Trump administration took it to the Supreme Court via an emergency application, and the conservative majority delivered, overturning the lower court’s block with an unsigned order stating DOGE members have a right to these records “to do their work.”
The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson lamenting the government’s “urgency” as mere impatience, but isn’t it time we prioritized results over endless red tape?
In a parallel move on the same day, the Supreme Court also granted a Trump administration request to temporarily protect DOGE from freedom of information demands seeking piles of documents.
This second ruling, building on a temporary hold by Chief Justice John Roberts from May 23, 2025, means the government can dodge document releases and depositions, like that of DOGE administrator Amy Gleason, while lawsuits drag on.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, behind this transparency push, grumbled they were “obviously disappointed” but took solace in some discovery moving forward—small comfort when the bigger battle tilts toward efficiency over endless oversight.
White House spokesperson Liz Huston didn’t hold back, calling this a “huge victory for the rule of law” and a win for commonsense reforms, a sentiment echoed by Solicitor General D. John Sauer’s insistence that DOGE teams have a “business need” for this data.
Meanwhile, Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano hailed the decision as a “major victory for American taxpayers,” promising modernization and better service, which sounds like the kind of government accountability we’ve been craving for decades.