In DOGE Lawsuit, Judge Declines To Block White House Emailing Federal Employees
Citing Reddit posts and podcast interviews, pseudonymous government employees are arguing that DOGE violated federal privacy regulations when setting up a government-wide email system.
Unnamed government employees suffered a setback in their legal efforts to stop the White House from emailing executive branch employees.
On Monday, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the plaintiffs' request to block the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) from using a "government-wide email system" established by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to communicate with all government employees.
D.C. District Court Judge Randolph D. Moss was unpersuaded that the anonymous plaintiffs, who are all using the pseudonym Jane Doe, suffered a serious enough injury to justify their request for a temporary restraining order.
"This is not a case in which Plaintiffs seek to protect highly sensitive personal information, like tax records or sensitive medical files. Instead, they seek to protect their work email addresses," wrote Moss.
Over the past several weeks, nearly a dozen lawsuits have been filed challenging DOGE's access to federal government record systems, mostly on claims that this access violates various procedural requirements found in federal privacy regulations.
The Jane Does sued OPM in late January on the grounds that the White House office let DOGE staffers set up its government-wide email system without producing a required "privacy impact statement" as mandated by the 2002 E-Government Act. The plaintiffs alleged that their personnel data were made vulnerable to hacks as a result.
It was this email system that the Trump administration used to issue its "fork in the road" deferred resignation program that offered federal employees eight months' severance pay if they resigned via email. (That since-closed program is also the subject of legal challenges.)
In a nod to the online nature of the case, their original complaint cites an anonymous, since-deleted Reddit post about the process by which the email system was set up. More recent court filings also lean on a podcast interview in which a privacy expert evaluates the potential for data breaches as a result of the new email system.
OPM has asked the court to dismiss the case on the grounds that the E-Government Act did not cover information collected for internal government operations, and even if it did the agency had subsequently produced a privacy impact statement.
Additionally, OPM argued the plaintiffs' assertion that their work emails were at risk of hacks because of an inadequate privacy impact statement was too vague to give them standing to sue.
In his order rejecting Does' request for a temporary restraining order, Moss appeared to side with OPM on most of its points, including the plaintiffs' lack of standing.
"It is not the job of the federal courts to police the security of the information systems in the executive branch, just as it is not the job of the federal courts to police the internal notations on consumers' credit reports," wrote Moss.
Moss also raised problems with the evidence plaintiffs had cited about the potential for data breaches, particularly their cited podcast interview with a security expert who had given a more mixed appraisal of the hacking risks posed by OPM's email list.
"The evidence provided by the podcast, therefore, is mixed at best," wrote Moss.
The upshot is that OPM can continue to use its government-wide email system to email government employees while the case is ongoing.
