Judge Declines to Block DOGE’s Access to Student Financial Aid Data

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on March 22, 2023. Richard Moore/The Epoch Times

A federal judge declined to block the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing the Department of Education’s student financial aid data on Feb. 17.

The ruling stems from a lawsuit brought by the University of California Students Association (USCA) against the Education Department and its acting secretary, Denise Carter.

The suit alleged that DOGE, in seeking to access the Education Department’s records, will have access to the students’ personal information, including social security numbers, as well as detailed financial data of their parents.

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss ruled that the plaintiffs had not shown sufficient irreparable harm to warrant emergency injunctive relief.

“Because the Court concludes that UCSA has failed to clear that essential hurdle, the Court’s analysis also ends there,” the judge wrote.

“The Court leaves for another day consideration of whether USCA’s has standing to sue and has stated a claim upon which relief may be granted. Those questions are less clear cut and are better answered on a more complete record.”

The USCA suit alleged that DOGE’s actions in accessing the department’s records would violate federal regulations, including the Privacy Act of 1974, which prohibits the department from sharing this data with a third party.

“Plaintiff UCSA’s members are among the 42 million federal student loan borrowers who have provided sensitive personal information to [the Education Department] in order to obtain a federal student loan,” the plaintiffs’ complaint stated.

“These are people who trusted [the department] with their sensitive personal information” when filing for student loans and grants, the complaint stated.

One UCSA student, remaining anonymous because of her family’s immigration status, submitted a supplemental declaration saying that DOGE accessing her records had given her anxiety and was causing her to reconsider her application for graduate school.

The department responded that the lawsuit is without merit, and raises “separation of powers concerns by impermissibly intruding into the President’s superintendence of the Department of Education.”

“There is no violation of the Privacy Act when employees of an agency, like the six individuals at issue here, access agency systems to perform their job duties,” the response stated.

A declaration by the education department’s chief information officer Thomas Flagg says that the department “routinely shares information with other Executive departments and agencies as part of other, non-DOGE-related initiatives, which [he does] not understand to be at issue in the litigation for which I submit this declaration.”

Moss drilled into both sides of the case in a hearing on Feb. 14, seeking to understand if DOGE employees who had been assigned temporarily to work at the department could be considered employees of that agency.

Moss highlighted what he saw as a “unique lack of transparency” in DOGE’s work.

“We don’t know who these folks are or what they are doing,” he said at the hearing.

The judge asked the plaintiffs if it was ever appropriate for government employees of an agency to conduct an audit.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs responded that it “depends on the nature of the audit.”

Likewise, the judge queried lawyers for the government about the broad scope of DOGE’s data acquisition.

“What would happen if the political director of the White House obtained the tax records of every Democrat candidate?” he asked.

The judge was also concerned that the student’s data was being fed into an AI portal for processing and sought clarification on the actual number of DOGE employees assigned to audit the Education Department.

Attorneys for the government estimated that number at six individuals. The plaintiffs alleged there were as many as 37.

On Feb. 17, DOGE employee Adam Ramada submitted a declaration to the court testifying that he was aware of only six “who have been granted access to Department information technology and data systems or who have otherwise received any Department information protected by the Privacy Act or section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code.”

Ramada also said that all employees, except one, had completed security and ethics training; the remaining employee is set to finish the training soon.