Our Privacy Act Lawsuit Against DOGE and OPM: Why a Judge Let It Move Forward

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Last week, a federal judge rejected the government’s motion to dismiss our Privacy Act lawsuit against the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). OPM is disclosing to DOGE agents the highly sensitive personal information of tens of millions of federal employees, retirees, and job applicants. This disclosure violates the federal Privacy Act, a watershed law that tightly limits how the federal government can use our personal information.

We represent two unions of federal employees: the AFGE and the AALJ. Our co-counsel are Lex Lumina LLP, State Democracy Defenders Fund, and The Chandra Law Firm LLC.

We’ve already explained why the new ruling is a big deal, but let’s take a deeper dive into the Court’s reasoning.

Plaintiffs have standing

A plaintiff must show they have “standing” to bring their claim. Article III of the U.S. Constitution empowers courts to decide “cases” and “controversies.” Courts have long held this requires the plaintiff to show an “injury in fact” that is, among other things, “concrete.” In recent years, two Supreme Court decisions – Spokeo v. Robins (2016) and TransUnion v. Ramirez (2021) – addressed when an “intangible” injury, such as invasion of data privacy, is sufficiently concrete. They ruled that such injury must have “a close relationship to a harm traditionally recognized as pr

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