Wired reports:

As Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency rampages through the US government, its access to sensitive data is alarming federal agencies and Americans who interact with them. In the month since the Trump administration began its purge of federal workers, opponents fighting DOGE in court have been pinning their hopes of stopping the world’s richest man on a 50-year-old law.

In just a few weeks, DOGE staffers have accessed federal employee records at the Office of Personnel Management, government payment data at the Department of the Treasury, data on student loan recipients at the Department of Education, information on disaster victims at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and vast amounts of employment- and workplace-related data at the Department of Labor. White House staffers are even pressuring the Internal Revenue Service to grant DOGE access to US taxpayer records. The acting head of the Social Security Administration recently resigned rather than give DOGE access to her agency’s reams of sensitive personal data.

More than half a dozen lawsuits are seeking to block DOGE employees from rifling through these vast troves of data. One thing they all have in common: They allege that DOGE’s actions violate the Privacy Act of 1974.

Here’s how a law passed after Watergate could rein in another president whose self-professed zeal for retribution is unnerving constitutional experts.

The Privacy Act is a law that limits how the federal government can collect, use, and share information about US citizens and other people in the United States.

The law’s core features include letting people access government records about them; letting people correct those records if they contain mistakes; requiring agencies to limit information collection, publish lists of records databases, and protect data from hackers; and restricting how agency employees and third parties can access records.

Those restrictions on accessing data are at the heart of the ongoing DOGE saga. [Continue reading…]

A federal judge in Washington, D.C. said he will likely grant federal labor unions’ motion for expedited discovery into the extent and types of access the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk have had to Department of Labor records. If granted, it would be the first instance of discovery being permitted in the Trump accountability cases and could give invaluable information into DOGE’s activities. Marc Elias and Paige Moskowitz explain: