The Ministry of Government (DOGE), newly formed by Elon Musk, has received another legal complaint concerning the violation of the privacy of millions of Americans.
Group of private life defenders The Electronic Frontier (EFF) Foundation filed the trial on Tuesday, February 11, 2025, alongside a coalition of private life defenders, several unions of federal employees and individual federal employees .
The objective is to prevent DOGE from accessing the data stored by the staff management office (OPM) and to request the deletion of any information musk service.
The EFF joins the wave of experts worried about confidentiality and workers’ unions across the United States, depositing prosecution against the new government agency for access to supposedly illegal data.
“Illegal” access to data to data
The OPM data set contains “extraordinarily sensitive” details on all federal workers and anyone who has already applied for federal employment, explains an expert. This is in particular identifiable information such as social security names and numbers, work experiences, union activities, wages, personal health data and even information of non-disclosure of classified information.
According to the eff, mismanagement of this information could open the door to abuse, endangering the security and privacy of millions of people in the country. For example, Musk made the headlines last year for publicly disclosing the names of government employees he wanted to dismiss after taking office.
“The question is not” what happens if these data fall into bad hands “. The data has already fallen into the wrong hands, according to the law, and it must be safeguarded immediately,” .
The EFF law refers to the 1974 Federal Privacy Act, under which access to this database and the disclosure of information should be strictly limited. The news that DOGE, as recently reported by the Washington Post, could even modify or delete all existing OPM records is even more worrying.
Overall, written efficient: “OPM data is extraordinarily sensitive, OPM gave it to Doge, and it violates the law on privacy. We ask the court to block any data sharing and Require that Doge immediately destroys all copies of all copies of downloaded equipment.
Bresse: We are continuing Doge and the staff management office to stop sharing cheeky and illegal data from the federal data of employees with the “Government efficiency” group. https://t.co/qtpvynesktFebruary 11, 2025
The American president, Donald Trump, signed a decree just after his inauguration ceremony Tasking Musk’s Doge with the restoration of “the competence and the efficiency of our federal government”. This decision, however, was not without controversy.
The EFF trial is indeed the last action against the new government agency of the billionaire. The first legal complaint was filed by the national security advisers a few moments after DOGE was officially recognized, under the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
Other legal actions have followed suit, because various experts in confidentiality across the country are increasingly concerned about access to the supposedly illegal data of Doge. For example, a unions coalition also filed a legal action only one day before the efficient, in similar premises.
The two came only a few days after a similar trial led a federal judge to temporarily prevent the staff of Doge from access to information from the Treasury Department.
The writing: “The violations of the privacy of the Americans took place in several agencies, unattended or guaranteed, and the eff is happy to join the proceedings to protect this critical information.”
