Virginia Judge Rejects Block on DOGE Access to Treasury Data (2)

The US Treasury Department and Office of Personnel Management can continue sharing Americans’ personal data with staff from the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency cost-cutting effort, a federal judge ruled Friday.

Judge Rossie D. Alston Jr. denied the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s request to block agencies’ disclosure of personally identifiable information, saying plaintiffs’ “speculative chain of events is insufficient to establish irreparable harm.” EPIC also failed to provide “concrete evidence” that the Trump administration “is actively misusing or even attempting to misuse their sensitive data,” Alston, appointed by President Donald Trump in 2019, wrote in his opinion.

The case would be more straightforward “if we could all agree this was a clear breach,” he said during a Friday hearing

Later on Friday, a federal judge in New York approved 19 states’ request for a preliminary injunction, extending an existing temporary ban issued on Feb. 8. Although parts of the injunction request were too broad, DOGE must certify by March 24 that its members have been vetted and trained to access secure payment data and other information, said Judge Jeannette A. Vargas of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The ban will eventually be reevaluated by Vargas, who was appointed in 2024 by President Joe Biden.

In Virginia, Alston, who converted EPIC’s request for a temporary restraining order into a motion for a preliminary injunction, became the fourth federal judge to reject plaintiffs’ attempts to block DOGE’s access to government data since the start of the second Trump administration a month ago.

EPIC accused the agencies of violating the 1974 Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act by giving DOGE personnel access to Treasury Department data in a lawsuit filed Feb. 10 in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The lawsuit alleged that DOGE employees gained access to troves of sensitive personal information, including social security numbers, tax information, and dates of birth without meeting statutory requirements. The non-profit privacy watchdog sought to prohibit the executive office from accessing personal data, and deletion of files they’d accessed for unauthorized purposes.

EPIC counsel John Davisson said in an email that the group was “disappointed” but respected the court’s ruling.

“We’ll continue to bring forward evidence showing the gravity of throwing open sensitive agency databases, the enormous privacy and security risks the DOGE is imposing on Americans, and the urgent need for the court to intervene,” he wrote in an email to Bloomberg Law. “We expect to prevail in this fight.”

Alston did not weigh in on EPIC’s argument that it has standing under privacy tort “intrusion upon seclusion.” Justice Department attorney Jonathan Lucier argued in a Friday hearing that EPIC lacked standing, and that Treasury did not violate the Privacy Act by granting access to data to one of its own hired personnel.

Moreover, such behavior did not meet the bar for a constitutional privacy injury because such government access could not be construed as “highly offensive to a reasonable person,” he argued.

EPIC’s suit is one of at least a dozen the Trump administration is facing related to agencies’ sharing of personal data with DOGE.

The case is Electronic Privacy Information Center v. U.S. Office of Personnel Management, E.D. Va., No. 1:25-cv-00255, TRO denied 2/21/25.