Could be. Unfortunately. Chris Geidner with the latest:
On Friday afternoon, heading into the weekend, the U.S. Supreme Court told the Trump administration that the non-department Department of Government Efficiency can more or less do what it wants.
In a pair of orders on the shadow docket, the court’s conservatives — over the objection of the liberal justices — allowed DOGE to access individualized, sensitive Social Security data for all Americans even as they prevented Americans from being able to access information about DOGE.
In the first case, a lower court order that blocked DOGE’s access to data from the Social Security Administration was stayed during litigation — meaning, DOGE gets access.
As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote for herself and Justice Sonia Sotomayor:
The Government wants to give DOGE unfettered access to this personal, non-anonymized information right now—before the courts have time to assess whether DOGE’s access is lawful. So it asks this Court to stay a lower court’s decision to place temporary and qualified limits on DOGE’s data access while litigation challenging DOGE’s authority to access the data is pending. … [O]nce 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.
[…]
The majority, meanwhile, barely provided any explanation. In a three-paragraph statement — which was issued neither per curiam (for the court) nor in the name of a specific justice — the court stated the basic facts, the standard for a stay, and its conclusion:
After review, we determine that the application of these factors in this case warrants granting the requested stay. 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.
That’s it. They had nothing more to say.
In the other case, the Supreme Court again granted the Trump administration’s request for a stay — and did so, again, over the objection of the liberal justices. This time, though, the conservative justices prevented access to DOGE’s data.
This order came in a case brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and it relates to whether DOGE is subject to public records requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) — or whether it is, in effect, exempted for now from such requests as a presidential record. As part of that determination, the district court issued an order that certain evidence be turned over. DOGE objected, and, on Friday, the Supreme Court held that even that minimal discovery was too much.
So DOGE can know everything about us but we can’t know anything about DOGE.
The president always gets the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the unitary executive. As expected. But you would think that they’d see that this fatuous monster proves that it’s much too risky to allow the president to have this much unfettered power. So far, I’m not hopeful. They have their priors and nothing that imbecile does shows them the error of their ways.