As Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has promoted cuts across the federal government, it has remained quiet about a central tenet of its work: access to personal, sensitive data on millions of Americans. But among critics and legal challengers, the issue of DOGE’s data access has become paramount.
Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and President Donald Trump’s largest campaign donor, has framed DOGE as a tech-forward attempt to reduce the federal deficit. Key to his effort is a small army of acolytes, most prominently young men with backgrounds in tech, being dispatched across government agencies and demanding access to databases that are usually only available to a small number of regulated and trained employees at each agency.
The issue has spurred at least 11 lawsuits that claim DOGE has illegally accessed significant swaths of Americans’ personal information. All claim that DOGE has violated the Privacy Act of 1974, passed in the wake of the Watergate scandal and President Richard Nixon’s resignation, which heavily regulates what information about American citizens federal agencies can store and who can access that information.
The lawsuits and the privacy claims have quickly become substantive challenges to DOGE and its ability to fully operate, and represent attempts by critics to slow DOGE’s actions in certain cases, at least temporarily.
At the Education Department, plaintiffs say students’ information was gathered through student loan applications. At the Treasury Department, plaintiffs allege that DOGE accessed systems that reveal Americans’ private tax information. (NBc News has confirmed that a DOGE employee at the IRS is expected to seek access to the agency’s Integrated Data Retrieval System, which agency employees use to access taxpayer accounts.)
Another lawsuit accuses DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management, akin to the federal government’s human resource department, of accessing the personal information and background checks of not just people who work for the U.S., the country’s largest employer, but people who have simply applied for jobs in government. At the Department of Labor, plaintiffs say DOGE workers demanded full access, including to sensitive documents like complaints about workplace health and safety concerns, ranging from black lung to the identities of workers who have made complaints. (Records seen by NBc News show that the Labor Department authorized DOGE employees to use software to remotely transfer large file sets.)
In addition to those legal claims, DOGE has tried to gain or gained access to people’s sensitive personal data from at least three other agencies. The top official at the Social Security Administration, Michelle King, left her job this weekend after she refused a DOGE request for access, according to two sources familiar with the situation, including personally identifiable information (PII) like Americans’ names and financial records.
Earlier this month, employees at the U.S. Agency for International Development were placed on administrative leave after trying to prevent DOGE employees from accessing classified systems and security clearance information on agency employees. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that DOGE has been given authorization to access Federal Emergency Management Agency data, including sensitive information about disaster victims.
critics say that DOGE's access to this data poses serious risks for Americans.
Kristofer Goldsmith, a plaintiff who’s part of a sweeping suit against DOGE over its alleged access to Americans’ information held by Treasury, OPM and the Department of Education, wrote in his explanation for the lawsuit that the potential for DOGE to misuse Americans’ PII is serious and irrevocable.
“The risks are staggering: identity theft, fraud, and political targeting. Once your data is exposed, it’s virtually impossible to undo the damage,” Goldsmith wrote.
Sen. Ron Wyden, of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance committee, told NBc News in an emailed statement Friday that DOGE’s Treasury access may mean it has Internal Revenue Service records on practically all taxpaying Americans.
“We’re talking about hundreds of millions of taxpayers and organizations, and abusing this data by disclosing or even inspecting it without authorization is a crime,” Wyden said.
Neither Musk nor the White House responded to emailed questions about the lawsuits and what steps, if any, DOGE takes to protect Americans’ privacy as it accesses data across various agencies. None of the agencies being sued or the Justice Department responded to questions about those lawsuits.
In some cases, the lawsuits’ against DOGE’s data access have provided rare orders to halt its activity. One suit, protesting DOGE accessing Treasury data, obtained a temporary order to halt the agency from sharing that information.
But those efforts are limited. Another suit, which sought to stop DOGE from accessing the Department of Education’s National Student Loan Database — which holds information on 42 million Americans — temporarily negotiated a freeze of that access, but on Monday a judge ordered that the access could resume.
One of the lawsuits against OPM, filed by the nonprofit internet rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is angling to get a temporary restraining order against DOGE implemented next week, a lawyer for the case told NBc News.
In his executive order establishing DOGE, signed on his first day in office, Trump ordered agencies to give it “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.” DOGE is also instructed to “adhere to rigorous data protection standards.”
But Elizabeth Laird, the director of equity in civic technology at the nonprofit center for Democracy and Technology, which is not involved in any of the suits, told NBc News that the potential for DOGE to improperly access, modify or take Americans’ personal information could heighten the likelihood of potential identity theft and breach their trust.
“These lawsuits raise questions about not just whether in the year 2025 we are doing all that we can to take good care of people’s sense of information, but are we even meeting the standard that was set 50 years ago,” she said.
In at least one instance, a federal agency has falsely claimed that DOGE’s access to sensitive data was more restricted than it actually was. The Treasury Department had told congress that DOGE was only given “read only” access to department payment systems, meaning they could see data but not alter data, in line with what an auditor would receive.
But that wasn’t strictly true. In a sworn affidavit in a lawsuit filed by a group of state attorneys general, the deputy commissioner for transportation and modernization in the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, Joseph Gioeli, said that Treasury gave one DOGE employee, Marko Elez, a secure laptop to access sensitive Treasury systems. On Feb. 6, the agency discovered that Elez’s laptop had been mistakenly set up to allow him to modify Secure Payment System files, though the agency does not believe he modified any files.
Elez also “may have occasionally” given screenshots of payment systems or records to another DOGE employee, Gioeli swore.
Elez resigned the following day, in the wake of a Wall Street Journal report that he had a history of posting racist and pro-eugenics comments online. Musk quickly said he would rehire Elez. Neither the White House nor Treasury responded to emails asking if Elez had resumed work.
