“The court saw that Elon Musk and his unqualified lackeys present a grave danger to Social Security and have illegally accessed the data of millions of Americans,” said one union leader.

Defenders of the Social Security Administration celebrated a federal judge’s Thursday order blocking U.S. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from access to millions of Americans’ SSA records.

“The DOGE team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion. It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack,” wrote Maryland-based U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander, who issued a temporary restraining order.

In her 137-page opinion, Hollander explained that “to facilitate the expedition, SSA provided members of the SSA DOGE team with 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.”

“Yet, 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,” noted the appointee of former President Barack Obama.

“Indeed, the government has not even attempted to explain why a more tailored, measured, titrated approach is not suitable to the task. Instead, the government simply repeats its incantation of a need to modernize the system and uncover fraud. Its method of doing so is tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer,” asserted the judge, concluding that “plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim that such action is arbitrary and capricious,” and violates the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

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