On March 20, 2025, the Administration issued a new executive order, which directed heads of agencies to roll back “to the extent permitted by law” information controls to facilitate sharing information between agencies.
The executive order asserted that this change was for “purposes of pursuing Administration priorities related to the identification and elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse.” This access is to include “comprehensive data from all State programs that receive Federal funding, including […] data generated by those programs but maintained in third-party databases” and “all unemployment data and related payment records, including all such data and records currently available to the Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General.” Agencies were also directed to review their classified information policies to determine if overclassification of information beyond national security needs is restricting access to information unnecessarily.
The executive order appears to be prompted by attempts by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to access various information systems, which have resulted in a number of lawsuits and the imposition of injunctions against DOGE operations. These lawsuits cite statutory restrictions on limiting who may access protected databases (for example, taxpayer records under 26 U.S.C. § 6103, Social Security records under 42 U.S.C. § 1306, or various categories of records subject to the Privacy Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552a).
Wider or unfettered information sharing as contemplated by the executive order often stands at odds with the Congressional policies behind the various information control statutes, which were often specifically designed to restrict intra-governmental information sharing activities or the creation of a single combined governmental information repository. For example, as Senator Ervin, chief sponsor of the Privacy Act, stated in his introductory remarks for the legislative history report on the Privacy Act, “Each time we give up a bit of information about ourselves to the Government, we give up some of our freedom. For the more the Government or any institution knows about us, the more power it has over us. When the Government knows all of our secrets, we stand naked before official power. Stripped of our privacy, we lose our rights and privileges. The Bill of Rights then becomes just so many words.”
The executive order did not direct specific reforms for agencies to implement. Instead, agencies were directed within 30 days to report proposed implementation plans to the Office of Management and Budget. The executive order exempted these revisions from the Administration’s policy requiring 10 regulations be deleted for every new regulation added.
If you believe that you may have been adversely impacted by a possible violation of government information, and wish to discuss your rights, consider contacting Gilbert Employment Law to request an initial consultation.