In a significant legal move, over 100 federal employees have filed a lawsuit today in the US Southern District Court of New York, claiming that the Trump administration’s action to grant Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to their sensitive personal information is unlawful. The plaintiffs are seeking a court ordered injunction to sever DOGE’s access to the data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which serves as the HR division for the United States and maintains records on federal workers, including Social Security numbers, phone numbers, and personnel files. WIRED has previously reported on the takeover of OPM by Musk and associates connected to him.
“The OPM defendants provided DOGE and its agents—many of whom are under 25 years old and were recently employed by Musk’s private firms—‘administrative’ access to OPM’s computer systems without undergoing the customary and thorough national-security vetting,” the lawsuit asserts. The plaintiffs accuse DOGE of breaching the Privacy Act, a 1974 law that regulates how the government can gather, utilize, and store personal data.
Among the defendants listed in the case are Elon Musk, the DOGE organization, the Office of Personnel Management, and the OPM’s acting director Charles Ezell. The plaintiffs encompass over a hundred individual federal workers from various sectors of the US government, alongside representative groups such as the AFL-CIO, a labor union coalition, the American Federation of Government Employees, and the Association of Administrative Law Judges. The AFGE represents over 800,000 federal employees, including those from the Social Security Administration and border patrol agents.
The plaintiffs are being represented by esteemed attorneys from the tech industry, including representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, and Mark Lemley, a tech and intellectual property lawyer who recently ceased representing Meta in a high-profile AI copyright lawsuit due to his disapproval of what he describes as the company’s embrace of “neo-Nazi madness.”
“DOGE’s unauthorized access to employee records seems to be a means through which they are attempting to achieve several other unlawful objectives. For instance, it is how they obtained a roster of all government employees to make their illegal buyout proposal; it provides them with access to information about transgender employees for the purpose of unlawful discrimination, and it supports the illegal dismissals that have been noted across various departments,” Lemley stated to WIRED.
EFF attorney Victoria Noble expresses increased concerns regarding DOGE’s data access due to the politically charged nature of Musk’s initiative. Noble suggests that there exists a possibility that Musk and his associates might exploit OPM data to target ideological adversaries or individuals they perceive as disloyal.
“There’s a notable risk that this information could be weaponized to identify employees for termination based on inappropriate criteria,” Noble told WIRED. “This data includes medical information, disability status, and details of individuals’ union affiliations.”
The legal team pursuing this recent lawsuit aims to expand their efforts. “This represents merely phase one, concentrating on obtaining an injunction to halt the ongoing violation of the law,” stated Lemley. The subsequent phase will involve the initiation of a class action lawsuit on behalf of affected federal employees.
