A brand new lawsuit filed by greater than 100 federal staff at present within the US Southern District Courtroom of New York alleges that the Trump administration’s resolution to offer Elon Musk’s so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE) entry to their sensitive personal data is against the law. The plaintiffs are asking the courtroom for an injunction to chop off DOGE’s entry to info from the Workplace of Personnel Administration (OPM), which capabilities because the HR division of the USA and homes information on federal staff resembling their Social Safety numbers, cellphone numbers, and personnel information. WIRED previously reported that Musk and other people with connections to him had taken over OPM.

“OPM defendants gave DOGE defendants and DOGE’s brokers—lots of whom are underneath the age of 25 and are or had been till just lately staff of Musk’s non-public corporations—‘administrative’ entry to OPM pc techniques, with out present process any regular, rigorous national-security vetting,” the criticism alleges. The plaintiffs accuse DOGE of violating the Privateness Act, a 1974 legislation that determines how the federal government can accumulate, use, and retailer private info.

Elon Musk, the DOGE group, the Workplace of Personnel Administration, and the OPM’s appearing director Charles Ezell are named as defendants within the case. The plaintiffs embody over 100 particular person federal staff from throughout the US authorities in addition to teams that symbolize them, together with AFL-CIO, a coalition of labor unions, the American Federation of Authorities Staff, and the Affiliation of Administrative Regulation Judges. The AFGE represents over 800,000 federal staff starting from Social Safety Administration staff to frame patrol brokers.

The plaintiffs are represented by outstanding tech business attorneys, together with counsel from the Digital Frontier Basis, a digital rights group, in addition to Mark Lemley, an mental property and tech lawyer who just lately dropped Meta as a consumer in its contentious AI copyright lawsuit as a result of he objected to what he alleges is the corporate’s embrace of “neo-Nazi insanity.”

“DOGE’s illegal entry to worker data seems to be the means by which they’re attempting to perform quite a lot of different unlawful ends. It’s how they obtained a listing of all authorities staff to make their unlawful buyout supply, as an illustration. It offers them entry to details about transgender staff to allow them to illegally discriminate in opposition to these staff. And it lays the groundwork for the unlawful firings we’ve seen throughout a number of departments,” Lemley instructed WIRED.

EFF lawyer Victoria Noble says there are heightened issues about DOGE’s information entry due to the political nature of Musk’s undertaking. For instance, Noble says, there’s a threat that Musk and his acolytes might use OPM information to focus on ideological opponents or “folks they see as disloyal.”

“There’s vital threat that this info might be used to establish staff to basically terminate primarily based on improper issues,” Noble instructed WIRED. “There’s medical info, there’s incapacity info, there’s details about folks’s involvement with unions.”

The Workplace of Personnel Administration and the White Home didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.

The group behind the lawsuit plans to push even additional. “That is simply part one, centered on getting an injunction to cease the persevering with violation of the legislation,” says Lemley. The following part will embody submitting a class-action lawsuit on behalf of impacted federal staff.