Appeals Court Lifts Injunction That Would Have Blocked DOGE Access To Personal Records

By Lauren Lifke, Maryland Matters

August 13, 2025

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that a group of veterans and labor unions were not entitled to a preliminary injunction that would have blocked DOGE access to their sensitive personal records.

The ruling, by a divided three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, affirms the same court’s decision in April, when it lifted an injunction by the U.S. District Court for Maryland that had temporarily blocked access to the personal records as a potential invasion of privacy.

The circuit court said the plaintiffs in the case — six veterans and five professional organizations — had not shown that they would suffer actual harm if their personal information was shared with officials from DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency set up by President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, supposedly to ferret out government waste.

Tuesday’s ruling in American Federation of Teachers v. Scott Bessent marked the second time this summer that the Trump administration has successfully gone to court to lift an injunction in a case out of Maryland that would have stalled DOGE access to personal records.

The U.S. Supreme Court in June granted a stay in a nearly identical case — Social Security Administration v. AFSCME — on similar grounds, ruling that the government, not the plaintiffs, would be harmed if DOGE workers were denied access to government records while the case proceeded through the courts.

In a sharply worded dissent to the June order, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the government failed to show that it would be harmed by letting the injunction stay in place while the case was heard, beyond the fact that “it cannot be bothered to wait for the litigation process to play out before it proceeds as it wishes.” Granting the stay would give DOGE access to what Jackson called “a repository of millions of Americans’ legally protected, highly sensitive information that — if improperly handled or disseminated — risks causing significant harm.”

“Today the Court grants ’emergency’ relief that allows the Social Security Administration (SSA) to hand DOGE staffers the highly sensitive data of millions of Americans,” Jackson wrote in the June 6 order.

The most recent case involves records in the Treasury, the Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management, each of which was working to provide DOGE with access to government records on individuals, under an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office.

The agencies were sued by AFT, the National Active and Retired Federal Employees, the National Association of Federal Employees, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and six individual veterans. They claimed that “they or their members have personally identifiable information housed in the agencies’ databases and … that disclosing the information to the agencies’ DOGE-affiliated employees would violate both the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.”

They sought a preliminary injunction to keep the agencies from granting DOGE access to the records while the case was pending. U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman agreed, issuing the injunction on March 24.

But the circuit court this week disagreed. It said a preliminary injunction is an extraordinary remedy that should be granted only when the plaintiffs can show that they are likely to prevail on all of the issues they raise, and said the plaintiffs here failed to do so.

In particular, the appellate panel said it was not clear the plaintiffs had standing to sue, since they had not shown a “concrete injury” from release of their information to DOGE officials. And their claim that sharing the data violates the Privacy Act ignores the fact that the act “allows records to be shared intra-agency with ‘those officers and employees of the agency … who have a
need for the record in the performance of their duties.'”

DOGE employees would have had such a need, wrote Judge Julius Richardson for the panel, in order to carry out the “broad and open-ended duty” in the executive order that they “improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems.”

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Richardson was careful to note that “we do not hold with certainty that Plaintiffs lack standing,” or that the Privacy Act does not apply or that any of their other claims will fail on closer inspection.

“We instead come to a statistically surer conclusion: that Plaintiffs have failed, by a decent margin, to show that they will likely prevail on all of these issues combined,” Richardson wrote. “The district court abused its discretion in finding that Plaintiffs were likely to prevail on each one, and with such certainty that they were likely to succeed overall.”

The appeals court sent the case back to Boardman for further consideration.

In a dissent, Judge Roger King said Boardman’s original injunction was limited and well-reasoned, temporarily limiting access to information that “includes Social Security numbers, income and assets, federal tax records, disciplinary and other personnel actions, physical and mental health histories, driver’s license information, bank account numbers, and demographic and family details.”

King wrote in April that Boardman’s injunction halted “what appears to be the illegal intra-governmental disclosure of highly sensitive personal information. Even a momentary lapse in the preliminary injunction preventing that disclosure could irreparably harm the plaintiffs” by granting “unfettered, unauthorized access to the highly sensitive personal data of millions of Americans, including veterans.”

He said Tuesday that the majority was right to say a preliminary injunction requires a high bar, but that it erred when “it conjures up an even higher one” that the district court could not meet.

“Contrary to the panel majority, the district court did exactly what it was obliged to do,” King wrote. “Specifically, in its thorough and cogent Opinion, the district court separately assessed the plaintiffs’ likelihood of success on the contested merits issues” and determined that they were likely to prevail and should be granted an injunction.

Requests for comment from attorneys and parties on both sides of the case were not immediately returned Tuesday.