Is Supreme Court giving US preferential treatment? That might be 'troubling message,' dissent argues
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson criticized the Supreme Court majority Friday for an emergency order allowing the Department of Government Efficiency to access data kept by the Social Security Administration. (Image from Shutterstock)
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson criticized the Supreme Court majority Friday for an emergency order allowing the Department of Government Efficiency to access data kept by the Social Security Administration.
“This court dons its emergency responder gear, rushes to the scene, and uses its equitable power to fan the flames rather than extinguish them,” wrote Jackson in a dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Elena Kagan would also have ruled against the government but did not join Jackson’s dissent.
USA Today covered Jackson’s June 6 dissent in an article noted by How Appealing.
The Supreme Court majority allowed access to the Social Security records by staying an April 17 preliminary injunction issued by Senior U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of the District of Maryland, who had cited a federal privacy law. Hollander said DOGE did not explain why it needed “unprecedented, unfettered access to virtually SSA’s entire data systems,” Reuters reports.
Jackson argued that the majority allowed the government to bypass a required showing of concrete harm while requiring it for others, sending “a troubling message” that legal standards and judicial system norms don’t always apply to certain litigants.
“It is particularly startling to think that grants of relief in these circumstances might be (unintentionally) conveying not only preferential treatment for the government but also a willingness to undercut both our lower court colleagues’ well-reasoned interim judgments and the well-established constraints of law that they are in the process of enforcing,” Jackson said.
“In essence, the ‘urgency’ underlying the government’s stay application is the mere fact that it cannot be bothered to wait for the litigation process to play out before proceeding as it wishes,” Jackson wrote.
Trump created DOGE in an executive order to modernize technology and maximize government efficiency. It has been used to cut government employees and programs.
SCOTUSblog, Law.com, Law360 and Reuters covered the Supreme Court’s order.
The majority said it did consider government injury along with three other factors when it stayed the district judge’s order. One of the other factors is whether the government made a strong showing of likely success on the merits.
The plaintiffs who sued had argued that Hollander’s order was limited in duration and scope because it merely banned access to the records before security training and background checks for DOGE members, according to SCOTUSblog.
Also on Friday, the Supreme Court issued a second June 6 order order that temporarily blocked a federal judge’s order to provide discovery documents in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against DOGE by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit watchdog organization. The Trump administration had argued that the discovery order had, in effect, granted the FOIA requests, Law.com reports.
Jackson, Sotomayor and Kagan dissented from the second order but did not issue a written opinion.
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