It’s official: the black robes have gone rogue. Again. In what’s quickly becoming a bad episode of Law & Disorder, we now have a Maryland federal judge blocking the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from doing what it was literally created to do—ensure the government isn’t hemorrhaging your tax dollars through fraud and waste. And this time, the prize goes to Judge Ellen Hollander, who’s now apparently moonlighting as head of the Social Security Administration and maybe even the Privacy Czar of the United States.
The ruling, all 137 eye-glazing pages of it, comes down to this: DOGE had been trying to access records at the SSA to root out fraud. You know, doing its job. The same job that’s supposed to protect American taxpayers from footing the bill for dead people collecting checks, duplicate accounts, and goodness knows what other creative scams are festering in the federal bureaucracy. But no, according to Judge Hollander, that’s just a “fishing expedition.” She claimed the agency was looking for “a needle in the haystack without knowing the needle is even in there.”
Excuse us, Your Honor, but welcome to how investigations work. You don’t uncover fraud by politely waiting for it to walk through the door with a sign that says, “Hello, I’m government waste.” You investigate, audit, compare records, and yes—sometimes you dig through a haystack. That’s called due diligence. What Hollander’s really saying is: unless you already know there’s fraud, you’re not allowed to look for it. Which, by the way, is a fantastic deal for anyone defrauding the government.
Trump has a mandate. District judges jam it up, hoping Trump loses momentum. John Roberts lets the injunctions stay in place for years. This is sabatoge.
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) March 20, 2025
And let’s not pretend this is just about privacy or overreach. This was a politically convenient ruling, pushed by—you guessed it—a coalition of government unions. Because of course it was. The last thing the bureaucratic blob wants is oversight, especially from an agency with a name like the Department of Government Efficiency. Just hearing that probably gives career federal workers hives. After all, when the watchdog actually bites, the unions cry foul.
But this isn’t just about DOGE. It’s part of a much bigger pattern we’ve seen unfold over the last decade, where judges—often unelected and unaccountable—decide they’d rather run the executive branch themselves. Remember the Trump administration’s deportation flight of Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang members? A judge literally grounded the flight. A federal court intervened in national security and immigration enforcement and essentially said, “Nah, we’ll handle this.” Same thing when another judge decided the president couldn’t issue an executive order affecting military policy on transgender service members. What’s next? Do we start submitting foreign policy memos to the Ninth Circuit for pre-approval?
Article II of the Constitution doesn’t say, “The Executive Power shall be vested in the Judicial Branch.” But someone should probably remind these federal judges of that, because they seem to think their job is to sit in the Oval Office in spirit, if not in person. They’re not supposed to set immigration policy or military policy or decide whether fraud investigations are worth it. That’s the role of the executive branch. Period.
This federal judge is neither the Social Security Commissioner nor the President pic.twitter.com/YpgSsSsjrK
— Benjamin Weingarten (@bhweingarten) March 20, 2025
And yet, every time an administration—especially a Republican one—tries to enforce the law, clean up bureaucracy, or take decisive action, a judge somewhere jumps out of the bushes with a 137-page injunction and a scolding tone. It’s not “checks and balances” when judges are acting like freelance cabinet secretaries. It’s judicial activism dressed up in legalese, and it’s undermining the people who are actually elected to run the country.
If we want to talk about a real threat to democracy, it’s not voter ID laws or mean tweets. It’s this creeping judicial overreach that lets one person in a robe override the will of the voters and the authority of the president. DOGE was trying to protect the Social Security system from abuse. Now, thanks to this ruling, the fraudsters can exhale—and probably send Judge Hollander a thank-you note.
Meanwhile, the American taxpayer is stuck with the bill. Again.
