Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency will not be allowed to access information at the Social Security Administration, at least for now, a federal judge has ruled.

The jurist says the world’s richest man is simply on a “fishing expedition” for fraud that has already led to the improper disclosure of Americans’ personal information. 

Judge Ellen Hollander of the district of Maryland said Thursday that Mr. Musk may be violating federal privacy laws by gaining unrestricted access to Social Security data. In issuing a temporary restraining order against Mr. Musk from seeing and retaining the information, Judge Hollander says Americans rightly have the “expectation” that the government will take care of their personal data and not hand it over to a political appointee. 

“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,” Judge Hollander writes. 

Mr. Musk has been on a quest to root out what he calls “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the Social Security system, which has many Americans worried that their checks may not be delivered in time for monthly rent payments, utilities bills, or other expenses. The DOGE chief has already said he will make mistakes during this process, though he will try to correct them quickly. 

Judge Hollander says that concerns about violations of federal privacy protections are worthy of the stoppage on DOGE’s access to Social Security information. The judge further says that DOGE’s plan for unrestrained access in trying to find fraud was irresponsible. 

“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,” she says. “Its method of doing so is tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer.”

Judge Hollander makes another slight at Mr. Musk’s DOGE team, implying that they are not only irresponsible, but they are hypocrites, as well. Mr. Musk has tried to keep his team members’ names out of public view, despite his promises to be perfectly transparent in his efforts. Judge Hollander says keeping your staff’s names secret while demanding unrestrained access to Americans’ data is ironic, to say the least. 

“Ironically, the identity of these DOGE affiliates has been concealed because defendants are concerned that the disclosure of even their names would expose them to harassment and thus invade their privacy. The defense does not appear to share a privacy concern for the millions of Americans whose SSA records were made available to the DOGE affiliates, without their consent, and which contain sensitive, confidential, and personally identifiable information,” the judge says.