Electronic Frontier Foundation

East County News Service

February 20, 2025 (New York) – The Electronic Frontier Foundation and a coalition of privacy defenders filed a lawsuit in New York on February 11 asking a federal court to block Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing the private information of millions of Americans that is stored by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and to delete any data that has been collected or removed thus far. The lawsuit also names OPM, and asks the court to block OPM from further sharing data with DOGE.

“We will not accept the brazen ransacking of millions of people’s sensitive data,” a press release from the EFF states. “Our case is fairly simple: OPM’s data is extraordinarily sensitive, OPM gave it to DOGE, and this violates the Privacy Act of 1974. “

OPM’s records are one of the largest, if not the largest, collections of employee data in the U.S. With co-counsel Lex Lumina, State Democracy Defenders Fund, and Chandra Law Firm, the EFF suit represents current and former federal employees whose privacy has been violated.

This massive trove of information includes private demographic data and work histories of essentially all current and former federal employees and contractors as well as federal job applicants. Last week, a federal judge temporarily blocked DOGE from accessing a critical U.S. Treasury payment system under a similar lawsuit. These violations of data privacy must not stand.

EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry states, “The question is not `what happens if this data falls into the wrong hands.’ The data has already fallen into the wrong hands, according to the law, and it must be safeguarded immediately. Violations of Americans’ privacy have played out across multiple agencies, without oversight or safeguards, and EFF is glad to join the brigade of lawsuits to protect this critical information.”