Yves here. Trump continues to suffer legal setbacks. The question is the degree to which he can keep defying the courts, as he has seemed determined to do with deportations. With that apparatus, Trump looks to have solid control over the military, Federal Marshals, and the FBI, so he appears able to continue to thump his nose at orders. It’s not clear that DOGE has yet achieved the same level of control across the many departments and agencies it has targeted.
Note that judges can impose civil contempt penalties. That remarkably can include incarceration, but per the Federal Marshals point above, a judge would not succeed, as he could normally, in ordering the gens d’armes in court to haul away the contempt perp. However, one interview of a judge indicated that the penalties are a maximum of $.1000 a day, as with criminal contempt, but can be set to double every day the defiance continues. From a Politico interview with former Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin:
Assuming that the judge — Judge Boasberg or any other judge for that matter — eventually concludes that the government deliberately violated a court order, what are the judge’s options?
I can tell you that every former judge I know has been asked this question by somebody in the media, including me. I think the only real option is civil contempt….
You could also sanction the person, and that’s always interesting, because you could have fines that double every day, so it can get serious fast. I don’t know how good at math you are, but a $1,000 fine doubling every day can quickly add up to real money — not for the United States government, but for an individual. If somebody was individually sanctioned, that adds up…
By Jessica Corbett. Originally published at Common Dreams
Defenders of the Social Security Administration celebrated a federal judge’s Thursday order blocking U.S. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from access to millions of Americans’ SSA records.
“The DOGE team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion. It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack,” wrote Maryland-based U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander, who issued a temporary restraining order.
In her 137-page opinion, Hollander explained that “to facilitate the expedition, SSA provided members of the SSA DOGE team with unbridled access to the personal and private data of millions of Americans, including but not limited to Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, hospitalization records, drivers’ license numbers, bank and credit card information, tax information, income history, work history, birth and marriage certificates, and home and work addresses.”
“Yet, defendants, with so-called experts on the DOGE team, never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE team needs unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government,” noted the appointee of former President Barack Obama.
“Indeed, the government has not even attempted to explain why a more tailored, measured, titrated approach is not suitable to the task. Instead, the government simply repeats its incantation of a need to modernize the system and uncover fraud. Its method of doing so is tantamount to hitting a fly with a sledgehammer,” asserted the judge, concluding that “plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim that such action is arbitrary and capricious,” and violates the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.
Thank you to @AFSCME, @ActiveRetirees, and @AFTunion for standing up to Musk in court to protect Americans’ privacy.
Today is a big step forward, but we can’t take our eye off the ball. Elon Musk must come before Congress to tell us what he plans to do. He is not above the law! https://t.co/z5qbDWTUNk
— Rep. John Larson (@RepJohnLarson) March 20, 2025
The plaintiffs in this case are three unions—the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Alliance for Retired Americans, and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—represented by Democracy Forward. In addition to DOGE, they sued the SSA and its acting commissioner, Leland Dudek, over the “data grab.”
“This is a major win for working people and retirees across the country,” AFSCME president Lee Saunders said of the Thursday order. “The court saw that Elon Musk and his unqualified lackeys present a grave danger to Social Security and have illegally accessed the data of millions of Americans. This decision will not only force them to delete any data they have currently saved, but it will also block them from further sharing, accessing, or disclosing our Social Security information.”
AFT president Randi Weingarten also welcomed the development, saying that “no one filed for Social Security believing their personal assets would be appropriated by a billionaire who attacks Social Security as a ‘Ponzi scheme.’ Americans must be allowed to retire with dignity and grace without having to worry about Elon Musk jeopardizing their savings.”
Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward—which is involved with multiple court battles challenging the Trump administration’s sweeping assault on the federal government—pledged Thursday that “our team will continue its legal efforts to ensure that this data remains protected and that those responsible are held accountable.”
Judges who have ruled against Trump and Musk’s agenda have faced threats of violence and impeachment.
WATCH: Social Security Works President Nancy Altman discusses Elon Musk's Social Security cuts with NBC News’ Liz Kreutz @LizKreutzNews @NBCNews pic.twitter.com/f6yPfUvrb1
— Social Security Works (@SSWorks) March 20, 2025
While the Musk-led entity’s attempt to gut the federal government has sparked various legal fights, “this ruling is the first time a federal court has explicitly mandated that Musk and DOGE delete unlawfully obtained data,” according to Democracy Forward.
Critics of the administration’s attempt to “sabotage” the SSA—which includes cutting phone services, laying off workers, shutting down offices, and stealing seniors’ earned benefits—warn that Trump and Musk are pushing for privatization.
As you point out in your intro, I think there is a major difference between available court powers and what they can really do. As Trump threatens everything he doesn’t like, including Roberts overnight, he has effectively won and will get his way.
An interesting thought, as they are successfully threatening about everything with withholding monies, what stops them from doing the same for the parts of the Judiciary they don’t like (e.g., an ‘unfriendly’ Circuit Court)? It has worked with universities, corporations, etc.
In my opinion we are well over the red line and are being ruled, indiscriminately, by an autocrat. There nothing I can think of that will stop him, and meanwhile the MSM sane washes what is happening.
PS the only thing standing between my canceling my NY Times subscription, which I basically don’t read anymore, and who has silenced too many voices that appear critical of Trump, is I enjoy the X-word puzzle. Many in my crowd say the same.
So for the price of an X-word puzzle, you and many in your crowd will keep paying the NyTimes to sanewash the Trump regime?
I believe there my be a typo as to the civil penalty in the introduction… it appears as $.1000 which is ten cents— later is piece it indicates a fine of $1,000.00. It appears the one-thousand-dollars is the penalty?
Open defiance of a court order–and not pursuing appeal, will be the Moment of Constitutional crisis.
No question in my mind that Trump and his off-book militias are standing by and standing ready, spoiling for a fight.
I hope it does not come to gun-play and open shooting war. The pearl-clutching opposition is neither well-armed, proficient in arms use, and mostly not interested in brutish war as opposed to enforcing a civil implementation of the rule of law. Precarity- it ain’t all about wages and work!
Here is a very distressing assessment from our 2024 Democrat Governor candidate and former gun manufacturing executive Ryan Busse:
https://ryandbusse.substack.com/p/midterms-or-shock-troops-in-2026
How does Musk plan to use all this private and personal information he has gleaned? Sell it? Use it in the unholy alliance of oligarch private enterprise x big brother government surveillance purposes?
Any which way he feels like. Unless he himself is destroyed by boycotts and cancellations all over the world.
The fine of $1000 per day and doubling every day afterward (1+2+4+8…) arrives at $1,024,000 in ten days. The 11th day is double that…real money!!
In my gambling daze, sometimes i’d try and let a $2 blackjack bet ride and if you win 9 hands in a row, that’s over a grandido.
My best though was only 7 in a row, only good for $256 before I lost the next hand.
https://archive.ph/k9efu
Trump Admin Threatens to Stop Social Security If DOGE Can’t Have Personal Data
Trump’s interim Social Security chief says he wants to turn off the program if Musk and DOGE can’t access Americans’ most sensitive data
Everybody can’t boycott everything. Some people can boycott some things.
How should donors to Trump be ranked in terms of boycott priority? Those which can be boycotted most easily? Those whose destruction through successful extermicott would torture and terrorise the “business” community” into engineering the removal of Trump from office?
Since everybody can’t do everything, which few most painful and destructive things should “everybody” focus on doing?
Exterminating every last dollar of Musk’s money seems like the very first ‘no-brainer’ to focus on.
Exterminating every branch and facet of Big Murdoch Media would be the second no-brainer to focus on. Hard to achieve, I know. Perhaps a years-long boycott of every Murdoch advertiser to dry up and exterminate Murdoch’s advertiser revenue streams?
And then making years-long changes to lifetime-consumption-patterns by as many millions of people as possible so as to destroy the most pro-Republican businesses and sectors would be the next no-brainer after that. It would be hard to do. What percent of totality of “defunding the enemy” would make the enemy weak enough to defeat?
Not sure I agree with the position that Trump has the military behind him, at least not to the degree he could get them to do something directly illegal. The recent immigrant deportation case is a poor litmus test for how far the military would go for Trump.
It may very well be true he has military backing to kingship levels, but so far we have no evidence of such support.
So it seems to becoming clear that if the Marshalls and DOJ thumb their noses at judges, there is no way to enforce any judges ruling. I doubt those fines will work, but maybe they will. Seems like a pretty thin thread to me. The only way left is impeachment, and how likely is this with the current structure of Congress? I suspect that unlike with Nixon, when the Republicans side with the Constitution, today the MAGA party is with Trump.
And of course, what happens then, once it becomes clear to millions that the judicial part of government has been nullified? Then, very likely, millions will go into the streets. And THEN Trump will declare martial law, which was and is probably the basic plan from the beginning.
Game over.
Only if the military backs the order, which we’ve seen no evidence they will do so.
And the military will have to get involved because I feel confident states with democratic governors will call out their national guard to prevent what they will see as illegal orders/actions.
The US is too big and bureaucratic for marital law to happen that easily.
It depends on if the military remains cohesive. Let a few units split off and you have the makings of a possible low level Civil War.
My main hope is that the military honours its pledge to support the Constitution, not any individual or ideological group.
Trump Admin Threatens to Stop Social Security If DOGE Can’t Have Personal Data https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-musk-stop-social-security-doge-data-1235300785/
Social Security Says DOGE Ruling Could Force Agency to Shut Down https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-20/social-security-says-doge-ruling-could-force-agency-to-shut-down
Can’t access these articles because they’re paywalled but looks like Dudek is threatening to shut down the whole system if ‘lil Elon (“Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”) and his DOGEbags don’t get their way.
We really are getting ready to find out if Social Security is a “Third Rail” for American politics.
Shut down the Social Security Administration for a few months and America will have its own ‘Colour Revolution,’ a Grey one.
Stay safe. Stack deep.
Nicely said. The oldsters can be frightening.