Labor Unions Expand Lawsuit To Protect Multiple Agencies From Doge

Federal employee unions tried Friday to protect an expanding number of government agencies from Elon Musk’s attempts to obtain sensitive data and cut personnel.

During a hearing in D.C. District Court, unions said they would broaden the scope of a lawsuit — which initially sought to block the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency from accessing Labor Department systems — to cover additional agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services , Education Department and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

They plan to amend their complaint over the weekend.

It's their latest attempt at using the courts to impede DOGE from reshaping the federal workforce and agencies' operations.

Judge John Bates, an appointee of President George W. Bush who oversaw Friday's hearing, ended the procedure without ruling one way or another.

Bates also cast doubt on whether unions had the legal standing necessary to sue the Trump administration for an action that has not yet happened — even as he expressed concern about Musk's team taking sensitive DOL data outside the agency and infringing on federal privacy law.

“Here you have people from outside the agency who are accessing the system for perhaps reasons other than why the system was created,” said Bates.

The judge was skeptical about DOGE's ability to properly handle such privileged information, given the relative youth and lack of government experience of some of its officials.

It “doesn’t seem to be a set up that would very easily give me confidence there will be no misadventures,” Bates said to Michael Gerardi, a Justice Department attorney who argued the case for the administration.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday by labor unions that represent federal employees and the organization Democracy Forward, is one of several seeking to neutralize the Trump administration’s attempts to overhaul the federal government. It not only sought to restrict DOGE from prying into DOL, but also to shield staffers from being punished if the administration believes they are impeding its work.

At the outset of the hearing, Bates had urged both sides to reach an understanding that would temporarily assuage unions’ concerns about sensitive information being exposed while still allowing Musk’s outfit to carry out its work, along the lines of a deal the Treasury Department struck in a separate matter involving DOGE.

However, after a roughly 90-minute pause, negotiations had not succeeded — in part because of the unions' decision to expand their lawsuit to other agencies.

Bates noted some surprise at the development, calling it “a bit of a pickle,” but allowed the hearing to carry on as initially scheduled with its specific focus on DOL.

The unions’ attorney argued Friday that Bates' intervention was necessary to prevent DOGE from running roughshod over sensitive personal and medical information that the Labor Department handles. Additionally he warned that there could be a “chilling effect” that prevents workers from coming to the agency if they believe their confidentiality won’t be protected.

“The sensitive information of millions of people is currently at imminent risk of unlawful disclosure,” Mark Samburg said.

He also tried to assure Bates that the potential harms to the unions and their members at the agency were not purely speculative, as the government made them out to be in their legal filings.

By the end of the hearing — which began at 2:30 p.m. and stretched into the evening — the judge said he would try to get a ruling to the parties when he could.

“You’ll have to wait and see when I get it out and what it says,” he remarked. “It is what it is.”