In a split ruling, the three-judge panel blocked a lower court decision that halted DOGE access at the Education Department, the Treasury Department and the Office of Personnel Management. U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman issued a preliminary injunction last month in federal court in Baltimore, saying the government failed to adequately explain why DOGE needed the information to perform its job duties.
The Trump administration says DOGE is targeting waste across the federal government by addressing fraud and upgrading technology.
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has also sided with the Trump administration in other cases, including allowing DOGE access to U.S. Agency for International Development and letting executive orders against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) move forward. The court left in place, however, an order temporarily blocking DOGE from the Social Security Administration, which contains vast amounts of personal information.
In Monday’s opinion, Judge G. Steven Agee of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that Boardman’s decision misread legal precedent in “requiring nothing more than abstract access to personal information to establish a concrete injury.” As a result, Agee wrote, the government demonstrated “a strong showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits of their appeal.”
Agee, a nominee of Republican President George W. Bush, was joined in his opinion by Judge Julius Richardson, who was nominated to the bench in 2018 by Republican President Donald Trump. They agreed to stay the preliminary injunction as the case proceeds.
In his concurring opinion, Richardson wrote that more evidence is needed to establish whether the access is necessary. “But it does not stretch the imagination to think that modernizing an agency’s software and IT systems would require administrator-level access to those systems, including any internal databases,” he wrote.
