In a move that has become extraordinarily rare among federal judges of the DC Circuit, one of them declined to issue a temporary restraining order against the operations of Elon Musk and his Department of Education team. On Monday, Judge Randolph Moss (Obama appointee) ruled that the harm alleged by the University of California Student Association, an organization representing students in the University of California school system, was “entirely conjectural.” The judge also pointed out that no evidence was presented that Musk or DOGE "would misuse or further disseminate this information.” That is, they, like every other plaintiff suing Musk and DOGE, lacked standing.

In the hearing, Judge Randolph seemed skeptical about the answers Department of Justice lawyers provided about the DOGE team.

Judge Moss stressed that it appeared that some of the Musk operatives working within the Education Department had also been rifling through data at other agencies, which went beyond anything done by the U.S. Digital Service, the office it supplanted.

“If these are people who work for an entity that was just stood up in the White House office a couple weeks ago, that have gone out in teams across the government, where individuals are not assigned to just one agency but to multiple agencies, and are going in and systematically going through vast quantities of data in a manner that is unparalleled in the history of the executive branch — in lightning speed throughout the government — that does seem a little bit different than the usual transition,” Judge Moss said.

This case was filed last Tuesday.

Separately on Tuesday, a Federal District Court judge in Washington temporarily restricted members of Mr. Musk’s team from gaining access to more than a dozen systems that store sensitive data at the department until Monday.

Two legal groups representing the University of California Student Association had brought a lawsuit seeking to keep Mr. Musk’s associates from combing through the Education Department’s data because of privacy concerns related to the personal identifying information that students routinely disclose when applying for federal aid.

In my view, this properly falls into the "not my circus, not my monkey" category of questions. It is literally none of the judge's business what other tasks members of the Executive Branch have been assigned to do, the speed at which they work, or whether the judge thinks this is "a little bit different than the usual transition." He does not get a vote on any of that, and the fact that he was concerned about it shows the smug arrogance of many federal judges.

The University of CA Student Association vs. Denise Carter by streiff on Scribd

The subtext, in this case, is that the plaintiffs are afraid that the federal government is going to use data from student loan applications to identify illegals, given the harping on the subject of divulging information outside the Department of Education and "irreparable harm" and this footnote:

When asked at oral argument whether there was “any reason to believe this [information] is being used for immigration purposes,” counsel for UCSA conceded that there was not.  Hrg. Tr. (Rough at 10).  Given Defendants’ representations to the Court regarding how the DOGE affiliated employees intend to use the information at issue, and the Court’s reliance on those representations, the Court would expect Defendants promptly to notify the Court should those representations prove inaccurate or incomplete.  As the record now stands, however, the Court has no reason to believe that any of the information at issue will be used for any purpose unrelated to the statutory mission of the Department of Education itself.

Hopefully, this will foreshadow things to come, but I doubt it. The hatred of Trump inside the DC Circuit because of the January 6 "insurrection" narrative and Trump's pardoning of people, of which these judges were trying to make examples, basically forecloses the possibility that the Trump administration can get a fair hearing. Plus, if you are waging lawfare, it doesn't matter if a ruling stands so long as it takes weeks or months to overturn the action.