A federal judge in Maryland granted a preliminary injunction on Monday banning the Education Department and the Department of Personnel Management from taking over sensitive data to Elon Musk and members of the Government Efficiency Office while privacy lawsuits continue.
The order was the latest development in a category of lawsuits aimed at Musk's access to a federal database containing personal information about US citizens. So far, the lawsuit has been largely successful in ensuring an ruling blocking Musk's team from this type of data.
In the opinion accompanying Monday's order, Judge Deborah L. L., U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, wrote that the Privacy Act of 1974 clearly required stronger protections for personal and financial data that could prevent Mr Musk from lying in his efforts to wash agency records.
The American Federation of Teachers sued to halt these efforts, whose members regularly submitted sensitive data to the department to support student loan forgiveness and other programs, and did not agree to the data being scrutinized by Musk's team. The judge issued a restraining order last month, extending it to Monday, citing reasoning from Congress that passed the Privacy Act more than 50 years ago.
“These concerns are just as prominent today,” she wrote. “No matter how important or urgent the President's Doge agenda is, federal agencies must follow the law and do so in this case it was not likely to happen.”
Federal judges in many cases were sympathetic to the argument that Musk's cleaning of the federal data system was at the expense of ordinary people who handed over financial records and personal information to the government for daily services.
Last week, a judge ordered the Social Security Agency to ensure that data given to Musk's team was first anonymized or edited. And last month, a judge in another case took similar steps to protect taxpayer information stored in the Treasury Department.
The lawyers behind these various challenges argue that injunctions are increasingly urgent, particularly in light of fear that data submitted by civilians can be used for other purposes beyond routine audits, including the identification and targeting of undocumented immigrants for deportation. Over the weekend, a draft report on a transaction between the Internal Revenue Service and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office showed that the Trump administration was already trying to use the data for that purpose.
Randy Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement Monday that Musk and his team are “a roughly running the privacy of Americans.” The judge acted to maintain a firewall between these efforts and the data of millions of people held by the education department, she said.
In her ruling, the judge reiterated that the union appears likely to win the case. But as in other cases, the rapid pace that the Trump administration has moved to dismantle the agency and overtake the courts could limit some of the practical implications of the order.
Already this month, the top education staff members were rushing to cut the institution's workforce in half. And the president of the executive order signed last week has directed institutional leaders to find ways to spin off some of its functions, and could move some of the databases that are questionable in the lawsuit to other departments, such as the Department of Small Business Management and the Department of Health and Human Services.
