A federal judge rules OPM illegally shared millions of employee records with DOGE

A U.S. district judge in New York found that the Office of Personnel Management violated federal privacy law and flouted cybersecurity practices when it shared federal employee records with members of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency. In a Tuesday ruling, Judge Denise Cote of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said that OPM granted DOGE agents access to systems holding records for tens of millions of past, current and aspiring federal workers without a credible reason. Cote said the government provided no explanation for why DOGE’s purported modernization efforts needed access to personally identifiable information (PII) when that access wasn’t needed in past modernization efforts. “The record also provides no support for a finding that it was the pursuit of a modernization agenda that prompted OPM to grant sweeping and expedited access to a score of DOGE Agents to its systems of records containing PII,” Cote said. The decision is a win for federal workers and their advocates in a long-running challenge to DOGE’s controversial activities premised on an aspiration of efficiency.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development officially has a new chief information officer — a familiar face with an exceptionally similar background to his predecessor.David Julian, who has served as HUD’s assistant CIO since July 2025, wrote in a LinkedIn post last month that he had taken over as the agency’s top IT official. HUD did not respond to multiple requests for comment at the time, but an update to the agency’s website this week confirmed the news. Julian replaces Eric Sidle, who left HUD in July to become the Interior Department’s CIO. Like Sidle, Julian worked for several years in the electric vehicle industry — at the same two companies. He was a senior staff autonomy program manager for the EV maker NIO from 2018 to 2019, according to his LinkedIn profile, before spending the next three-plus years in various engineering roles at Chargepoint, an EV charging network and hardware provider. Prior to his move into the EV world, Julian spent a decade at Apple, where he was head of data pipeline operations for autonomous systems, per his bio. He overlapped with Sidle at Apple for about five years.

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