{"id":7328,"date":"2026-10-23T01:05:26","date_gmt":"2026-10-23T01:05:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vaultinsider.top\/?p=7328"},"modified":"2026-10-23T01:05:26","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T01:05:26","slug":"judge-federal-elon-musks-doge-broke-the-law-government-lawyers-barely-defend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vaultinsider.top\/?p=7328","title":{"rendered":"Judge: Federal Elon Musk\u2019s DOGE broke the law, government lawyers &#8216;barely defend&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/GettyImages-2299248528_36b86b-e1792698935185.jpg?w=2048\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) breached federal law by sharing sensitive government data with the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), according to a federal judge.<\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In a 39-page ruling released on Tuesday, Judge Denise Cote said OPM violated the Privacy Act of 1974, a post-Watergate law which prohibits the disclosure of certain records and outlines requirements for safeguarding others, and subsequently disobeyed its own cybersecurity practices.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">OPM failed to provide a credible reason for why DOGE would need access to personally identifiable information (PII) of tens of millions of federal employees, as well as applicants and retirees, according to Cote.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThe defendants barely defend its legality, relying instead on what has happened since to argue that the case is moot and that prospective relief is unnecessary,\u201d Cote wrote in her ruling.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Musk assembled DOGE in the first days of President Donald Trump\u2019s second term, claiming the special advisory would root out waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government. While DOGE claims to have saved the government $215 billion in cancelled contracts and the reduction of approximately 300,000 government workers, former federal employees, including former IRS acting Commissioner Douglas O\u2019Donnell, have warned the sweeping cuts will have lasting impacts on the government\u2019s ability to increase efficiency through updated technology.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Department of Justice (DOJ), which served as the legal team for OPM, argued in previous court filings that DOGE agents required access to sensitive data\u2014including employee records, background checks, medical files, and banking information\u2014as part of the group\u2019s workforce modernization efforts. However, previous government modernization initiatives have not required access to such information, Cotes said, and the administration never made a connection between the access to data and DOGE agents\u2019 responsibilities.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Cotes also rejected the government\u2019s argument that the lawsuit was moot because DOGE is no longer a centralized entity. While DOGE agents have had access to sensitive OPM data since September 2025, one former agent is not employed at OPM, Cotes said. She did not offer a final remedy for the case.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">OPM and DOJ did not respond to <em>Fortune<\/em>\u2019s requests for comment.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Policy experts and federal workers share privacy concerns<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A coalition of unions, including the AFL-CIO, filed a lawsuit against DOGE and the Department of Labor in February 2025, challenging the special advisory\u2019s access to private information.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At the time, Musk justified the increased access as a means to reconcile variabilities in how government data was stored and displayed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThese databases don\u2019t talk to each other,\u201d Musk said in a Fox News interview last February. \u201cAnd that\u2019s really the source of, that\u2019s the biggest vulnerability for fraud, is the fact that these databases don\u2019t talk to each other. So we need to reconcile the databases. It\u2019s a, frankly, painful homework, but it has to be done, and will greatly improve the efficiency of the government systems.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Policy experts, however, have warned DOGE\u2019s access to government data could present significant cybersecurity and privacy risks, such as private-sector engineers without clearances having sensitive information on personal devices, as well as the increased vulnerability of a centralized database to hackers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cBeing able to amass all of that information will give the federal government unprecedented power and control to do with that information a number of things that we just haven\u2019t experienced as a country before,\u201d Elizabeth Laird, the director of equity in civic technology at technology policy nonprofit the Center for Democracy and Technology, told <em>Fortune<\/em> last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Even if the dissemination of the data was legally permissible, Laird argued, it would still be a threat to the security of the information.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cSomething can be private, and something can be secure, and it can be legal,\u201d she added. \u201cAnd it can still be a bad idea.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>#Judge #Federal #Elon #Musks #DOGE #broke #law #government #lawyers #barely #defend<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Office of Personnel Manage&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7329,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4439,3018,2620,3938,5630,1688,991,419,998,3616,1622,3747,2701,913],"class_list":["post-7328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-barely","tag-broke","tag-data-privacy","tag-defend","tag-doge","tag-elon","tag-elon-musk","tag-federal","tag-government","tag-judge","tag-law","tag-lawyers","tag-musks","tag-security"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.1 - 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