Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, accused of unprecedented violations of privacy laws by accessing Americans’ most sensitive personal data, is claiming the public disclosure of its employees’ identities is the illegal invasion of privacy.

Musk and some supporters of the group’s mission took to social media to argue that oversight and media reporting about DOGE employees elevates to doxxing: the practice of disclosing an individual’s personally identifying information online without their consent. A clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, for example, published the names and emails of more than 30 DOGE employees in a post on Bluesky Thursday.

Edward R. Martin Jr., President Donald Trump‘s interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia, who’s been nominated for the full-time position, took the allegations seriously, promising Musk that his office will investigate threats against DOGE workers and other government employees. “If people are discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them and we will chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable,” he wrote them in a letter last month.

But consumer protection advocates and some privacy lawyers say Musk’s legal claims are unclear at best, and nonexistent at worst. Government employees who make decisions, they said, have little expectations of personal privacy in their government duties. And Musk himself posted the names and titles of several federal employees working on climate-related issues on X in November, leading at least one to delete their social media accounts, CNN reported.

“It certainly seems to be a case of ‘privacy for me and not for thee,’” said Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel in the ACLU’s National Political Advocacy Department working on issues in surveillance, privacy, and technology.

DOGE is at the heart of a dozen lawsuits against federal agencies including the US Labor, Treasury, and Education departments. The suits claim that the government allowed DOGE to access data including mortgage statements, tax returns, immigration status, and Social Security numbers, violating a Watergate-era privacy law and several other statutes.

A federal judge on Friday rejected a group of unions’ bid to temporarily halt DOGE from accessing the Treasury Department’s payments system. Still, she left the door open for future injunctive relief, noting that if the groups could show the government planned to imminently make members’ private information public or share it with individuals outside the government, the court “would not hesitate to find a likelihood of irreparable harm.”

The government has argued in court filings that the lawsuits’ attempt to curb DOGE’s access to government data is a restriction on Trump’s constitutional powers.

“The concerns over DOGE violating privacy, about DOGE having access to many of these files and information across the government is unfounded,” said Zack Smith, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation. “Because fundamentally, at the end of the day, DOGE and any of its employees are government workers working at the behest of the president of the United States, the head of the executive branch of government.”

Martin’s office declined to comment. DOGE couldn’t be reached for comment.

‘Extremely Different’

Protections from public disclosures of personal details about civil servants are essential to protect them from exposure to harassment and other threats, Smith noted.

“It certainly seems to be a double-standard,” Smith said. “Typically civil servants, line government workers, their information is still somewhat protected.”

While line-level government employees with little discretion can generally claim privacy protections from public oversight—including the right to have personally identifying details redacted from records released under the Freedom of Information Act—staff in more senior roles or with more power fall within a separate bucket, said Aaron Mackey, free speech and transparency litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

EFF represents plaintiffs in a suit against Musk, DOGE and its acting administrator, and the Office of Personnel Management and its acting director Charles Ezell.

These are “extremely different cases,” Venzke said. There’s a “big difference between Americans whose data is being accessed by DOGE because they apply for Medicaid, Social Security, or file their taxes—and the folks that run the DOGE program,” he continued.

For decades, courts have repeatedly balanced officials’ privacy interests against the public’s interest in the disclosure of government-related information.

Here, DOGE workers hold “an incredible amount of power at the direction of the president,” Mackey said, arguing that the power tilts the balance of privacy protections against them.

“What information is the concern here? It’s literally their names,” he said. “Do you have an incredible amount of privacy when it comes to your name? It’s minimal. And what is the public’s interest in disclosure?”

Still, the lack of strong legal arguments may ultimately not deter Musk and others from turning the tables on DOGE’s opponents.

Successful—or any—litigation may “not be the point,” Venzke said. Threats similar to Martin’s may “get the chilling effect.”