Dive Brief:
- The Department of Government Efficiency must disclose information on its structure and scope as part of a lawsuit brought by organizations alleging that DOGE staff improperly accessed sensitive data housed in the U.S. Department of Labor and other federal agencies, a federal judge held March 19.
- Judge John Bates of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia previously denied two motions for a temporary restraining order filed by the plaintiffs in AFL-CIO v. Department of Labor. However, the court set briefing schedules for the plaintiffs’ motion to preliminarily enjoin DOGE staff from accessing the relevant data. It also partially granted the plaintiffs’ motion for limited expedited discovery.
- DOGE argued that the order granting expedited discovery be reconsidered because its staff had been made direct agency employees and therefore were permitted to view the disputed data. Bates disagreed, writing that whether DOGE staff’s access to the data violated federal law, and whether those staff could be lawfully detailed to the agencies, were questions that still must be resolved in order to rule on the plaintiffs’ motion.
Dive Insight:
Proceedings in the lawsuit, brought by plaintiffs including the AFL-CIO and member unions as well as the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, will play out over the coming weeks in one of many challenges to DOGE’s access to federal government databases.
President Donald Trump directed DOGE, a rebrand of the U.S. Digital Service under the de facto leadership of Elon Musk, to restructure the workforces of DOL and other federal agencies in a Feb. 11 executive order. Federal workers’ unions swiftly criticized the order and sued to block DOGE from accessing sensitive DOL data. A bipartisan group of senators echoed those concerns during a Feb. 27 confirmation hearing for Keith Sonderling, Trump’s recently confirmed nominee for deputy labor secretary.
Specific data at issue in the lawsuit include federal workers’ medical and benefits information, the identities of workers who filed wage-and-hour or occupational safety complaints with DOL and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics records, among other items, according to the complaint.
The plaintiffs alleged that the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act by allowing DOGE staff to access such data, an act that is itself an alleged violation of the Privacy Act of 1974, which prohibits disclosure of agency records to any person or to another agency without prior written consent of that person.
Though the Privacy Act provides exceptions to this rule, including permitting agencies to disclose records to agency employees who require the records to perform their duties, the plaintiffs argued that DOGE staff did not constitute employees, per the court.
Bates ultimately held that the plaintiffs’ discovery request “was properly scoped to address the issue of irreparable harm.” DOGE and its co-defendents argued that such discovery was no longer appropriate because DOGE employees were made direct hires of the relevant agencies as of March 5 and were therefore permitted to view information under the Privacy Act.
Bates rejected DOGE’s argument, stating even if the court were to accept claims that DOL and other agencies had directly hired DOGE employees, the legal dispute over whether DOGE is permitted to detail employees to other agencies within the federal government “would not be put to bed.” He also said that, should the court find that DOGE did not have this authority, records accessed by DOGE employees may have been unlawfully accessed.
DOGE argued that some of its staff were simultaneously employed by DOGE and the relevant agencies, but Bates said the defendants did not explain how such dual employment operates or to whom the employees ultimately reported.
“This is not the typical two-job situation where a person has one job — say as a teacher — that’s unrelated to their other job — say as a barista,” Bates said. “Here, the [DOGE] employees’ jobs at the agency defendants entail carrying out the DOGE agenda at those agencies. So do they answer to the [DOGE] higher ups, or agency defendant higher ups? If the answer is the former, the dual employees could be impermissibly sharing the defendant agencies’ records with officials outside of the agency.”
Bates set a deadline of March 31, 2025, for the expedited discovery. Meanwhile, DOGE’s access to federal agency data has been challenged on other fronts. A Maryland federal judge on Monday blocked DOGE staff from accessing sensitive information at agencies including the U.S. Departments of Education and the Treasury as well as the Office of Personnel Management.
