On July 30, 2026, U.S. District Judge Rossie D. Alston Jr. of the Eastern District of Virginia, a Trump appointee, denied the government's motion to dismiss a privacy lawsuit over the Department of Government Efficiency's access to Americans' personal data, letting the case move forward. The suit, Electronic Privacy Information Center v. Office of Personnel Management, was brought by EPIC and an anonymous federal worker against the Treasury Department, OPM, and DOGE.
The complaint alleges DOGE illegally forced Treasury's Bureau of the Fiscal Service and OPM to hand over vast stores of personal information about federal workers and ordinary Americans to untrained personnel with no legitimate need to see it. Alston ruled the plaintiffs had standing and had stated a valid claim, writing that the government “failed to show that the plaintiffs' amended complaint should be dismissed at this time.” He noted that the en banc Fourth Circuit had already rejected the government's standing arguments in a related case over DOGE's access to Social Security data.
The ruling is a procedural win, not an injunction. DOGE can keep accessing the data; the same judge declined to block that access earlier, in February 2025. What the decision does is keep alive one of the central legal challenges to DOGE's mass ingestion of federal data systems (see Justice Department Admits DOGE Mishandled Social Security Data, Backing Parts of a Whistleblower's Complaint).