ALSO SEE: US Supreme Court Allows DOGE Broad Access to Social Security Data

The orders were another example of the Supreme Court granting a Trump administration’s emergency request to lift or scale back lower court rulings blocking his initiatives.

A divided Supreme Court on Friday sided with the Trump administration for now in two cases involving the U.S. DOGE Service, whose efforts to slash government agencies and obtain data about Americans have been mostly shrouded from public view.

The justices cleared the way in the first case for DOGE representatives to access the sensitive Social Security Administration data of millions of Americans, while litigation on the matter continues.

In the second case, the high court shielded DOGE — which stands for the Department of Government Efficiency — from having to immediately disclose records to a government watchdog group seeking information about the service.

The court’s three liberal justices disagreed with the conservative majority’s actions in both cases with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warning of “grave privacy risks for millions of Americans.”

Taken together, the orders were another example of the Supreme Court granting most of the Trump administration’s emergency requests to lift or scale back lower court rulings blocking his initiatives while legal challenges play out.

The justices have allowed the administration to bar transgender troops from the military, fire independent agency leaders without cause, halt teacher grants, and remove protections for as many as 350,000 Venezuelans while legal challenges to all those efforts make their way through lower courts. The court has also cleared the way for Trump to revoke legal status for more than 530,000 migrants.

The exceptions have come in cases involving the due process rights of migrants targeted for fast-tracked deportation. In such cases, the justices have required the government to provide notice and opportunity for the immigrants to challenge their removals.

Jackson used her lengthy dissent in the Social Security case on Friday to criticize her colleagues in the majority for “jettisoning careful judicial decisionmaking” and more broadly for allowing the administration’s initiatives to take effect even though lower courts have not yet ruled on the legality of those measures.

She suggested the court has different rules for the Trump administration, largely granting its emergency requests when the only emergency is that the government “cannot be bothered to wait.”

“That sentiment has traditionally been insufficient to jus­tify the kind of extraordinary intervention the Government seeks,” wrote Jackson, who was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “But, once again, this Court dons its emergency-re­sponder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them.”

Justice Elena Kagan noted that she too would have denied the administration’s request.

The Trump administration had asked the justices to intervene after a federal judge in Maryland said DOGE representatives appeared to have violated privacy laws by viewing the personal data of some of the more than 70 million Americans who receive Social Security benefits.

In siding with the administration Friday, the majority said it had considered factors such as the public interest and the government’s likelihood of success on the underlying legal questions.

“We conclude that, under the present circumstances, SSA may proceed to afford members of the SSA DOGE Team access to the agency records in question in order for those members to do their work,” according to the unsigned order.

DOGE, created by President Donald Trump and initially overseen by Elon Musk, is collecting the sensitive data of U.S. citizens and residents from across the government, The Washington Post has reported, as part of the Trump administration’s effort to find and deport undocumented immigrants as well as eliminate alleged mismanagement and fraud in government payments.

DOGE has faced several lawsuits over its attempts to access agency records, as well as over Musk’s influence in the government as a temporary employee of the White House who was not confirmed or vetted by Congress.

Two labor unions and an advocacy group went to court to try to block DOGE’s access to data at the Social Security Administration, saying such access created a major privacy and security risk for their members and raised concerns among retirees about their benefits. The federal Privacy Act says only employees who need the information to carry out their job responsibilities should have access to Social Security records.

U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander temporarily blocked DOGE and its affiliates from working with Social Security data. Hollander, a nominee of President Barack Obama, said DOGE “essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion.”

The order did not prevent the Social Security Administration from giving DOGE access to redacted or anonymized data, and DOGE team members can obtain narrow access to non-anonymized data under specific conditions set by the court.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit declined to block Hollander’s order, and the Trump administration appealed.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who represents the administration at the high court, had told the justices that the DOGE team has an urgent, legitimate business need to “subject the government’s records to much-needed scrutiny” as part of the president’s efforts to streamline government and modernize outdated systems.

Lawyers from the advocacy group Democracy Forward told the justices that Hollander’s order blocking access to birth dates, driver’s license numbers and health and wage information is narrow and temporary, and called Trump’s actions a “sudden and striking departure from generations of precedent spanning more than a dozen presidential administrations.”

The coalition led by Democracy Forward said that it was disappointed by the decision. “This is a sad day for our democracy and a scary day for millions of people,” adding that the group “will continue to use every legal tool at our disposal to keep unelected bureaucrats from misusing the public’s most sensitive data as this case moves forward,” it said in a statement.

In the second case, Trump officials had made an emergency appeal to the justices, asking them to put on hold a lower court order requiring DOGE’s administrator to give a deposition and turn over materials to determine if DOGE is subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a FOIA request in January, saying DOGE was operating with little transparency as it gutted agencies, initiated mass layoffs and cut programs.

DOGE rebuffed the request for records, so CREW filed a lawsuit to obtain material including emails, an organizational chart, ethics pledges and financial disclosures, that would provide visibility into how DOGE was carrying out its work.

Trump officials said DOGE is a presidential advisory board — not a government agency — so it is exempt from complying with the public records law. But a federal judge found in March that DOGE was most likely subject to disclosure laws and ordered DOGE to hand over records, saying it operated with “unusual secrecy.”

In their emergency order on Friday, the justices said a lower court order giving CREW access to some records was not “appropriately tailored.”

“The separation of powers concerns counsel judicial deference and restraint in the context of discovery regarding internal Executive Branch communications,” the majority wrote in the unsigned order.

The justices remanded the case to a lower court to narrow the scope of the order requiring DOGE to turn over documents. The majority said internal executive branch recommendations by DOGE should be exempted.