WASHINGTON (TNND) — An appeals court ruled on Tuesday that President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) can access sensitive data on Americans while trying to downsize the government.

The 2-1 vote from the Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals grants access to data stored at the Treasury Department, Education Department and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

In June, the Supreme Court cleared the way for DOGE to access Social Security systems containing personal data on millions of Americans. The high court halted an order from a judge in Maryland restricting the team’s access to the Social Security Administration under federal privacy laws.

The unions involved in the lawsuit include the American Federation of Teachers and the National Federation of Federal Employees.

"Plaintiffs alleged that they or their members have personally identifiable information housed in the agencies’ databases and claimed that disclosing the information to the agencies' DOGE-affiliated employees would violate both the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act ('APA')," the ruling reads.

According to the 4th Circuit, the unions did not show how they would be injured by DOGE accessing agencies' computer systems.

Judge Robert B. King dissented and seemingly agreed with concerns about the lack of public information in DOGE's operation.

“Just in early February 2025, the district court found itself confronted with this matter of immense urgency and import: the president’s new Department of Government Efficiency, or ‘DOGE,’ had been accorded sudden, unfettered, unprecedented and apparently unnecessary access to highly sensitive personal information belonging to millions of Americans,” he wrote.

The Trump administration last week formally ended the program requiring federal workers to document, weekly, five accomplishments launched by Elon Musk when he was the director of DOGE.

The program was part of the DOGE initiative to cut down the size of the federal workforce, creating tensions between the government and agency heads who were blindsided by the order. However, some agencies told their workers to ignore the email, and OPM let agency heads use their discretion for handling the request.