A new trial brought by more than 100 federal workers today before the New York district court alleges that the Trump administration’s decision to give Elon Musk the so-called Ministry of Government Effectiveness (DOGE) to Their sensitive personal data is illegal. The complainants ask the court an injunction to cut DOGE access to the Office of Personal Management (OPM), which works like the HR service in the United States and shelters data on federal workers such as their Social security numbers, telephone numbers and personal files. Wired previously reported that Musk and people with bonds had taken up OPM.
“The defendants of the OPM gave the defendants Doge and the Doge agents – many of whom are under 25 years of age and were or were until recently employees of private Musk companies -” Access to “reduction in National OPM security, without undergoing normal and rigorous verification of national and rigorous security, ”alleges the complaint. The complainants accuse Doge of violating the Privacy Act, a 1974 law which determines how the government can collect, use and store personal information.
Elon Musk, the DOGE organization, the staff management office and the acting director of the OPM, Charles Ezell, are appointed defendants in the case. The complainants include more than a hundred individual federal workers from the American government as well as groups that represent them, including AFL-CIO, a coalition of unions, the American Federation of Government employees and the judges of the Association of administrative law. AFGE represents more than 800,000 federal workers ranging from employees of the social security administration to border patrol agents.
The complainants are represented by eminent lawyers of the technological industry, in particular the advice of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group for the defense of digital rights, as well as Mark Lemley, an intellectual property lawyer and technology which recently abandoned Meta in As long as a customer in his disputed trial in matters of copyright because he offended that he alleys is the adoption of the society of “neonazia madness”.
“The illegal access to Doge to employees’ files turns out to be the means by which they are trying to carry out a number of other illegal ends. This is how they obtained a list of all government employees to make their illegal redemption offer, for example. It gives them access to information on transgender employees so that they can illegally discriminate to these employees. And he laid the basics of illegal layoffs that we have seen in several departments, “Lemley told Wired.
The lawyer for the EFF, Victoria Noble, says that there are increased concerns concerning access to Doge data due to the political nature of the Musk project. For example, says noble, there is a risk that Musk and its acolytes can use OPP data to target ideological adversaries or “the people they consider to be unfair”.
“There is a significant risk that this information can be used to identify employees to terminate essentially according to inappropriate considerations,” said noble to Wired. “There is medical information, there is information on disability, there is information on the involvement of people with unions.”
The team behind this last trial plans to push even further. “This is only phase one, focused on the implementation of an injunction to stop the continuous violation of the law,” explains Lemley. The next phase will include the filing of a collective appeal on behalf of the affected federal workers.
