Did you hear the story about the tech billionaire and world’s richest man getting access to a heap of sensitive information belonging to American citizens? It’s not fiction.
On Feb. 7, 2025, a small team of young engineers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) entered the Department of Education (DOE) and gained access to millions of people’s student loan information, including social security and data on parents and spouses. This was carried out with no authorization from those whose data was being accessed.
The access that Musk and his unvetted DOGE team had to private and personal information would normally constitute a violation of the Privacy Act of 1974, 5 U.S.C. § 552a(b), under “Conditions of Disclosure to Third Parties.”
This section, broken up into two subsections, states that, with 12 exceptions, “‘No agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains.’”
For the average American civilian, this would mean that no government agency would have the power to disclose your sensitive information 一 like taxes and social security 一 to another agency or any type of third party without your consent.
The same day that Musk’s team accessed the DOE’s records, the University of California Student Association filed a suit against the DOE and Denise Carter, Acting Secretary of Education, for allowing this to happen. The suit called for a temporary restraining order against the DOGE by the DOE, blocking Musk and his team from further accessing the student loan information of many Americans.
After learning of this, people were alarmed, even mistakenly seeing it to be a violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which is meant to help the DOE prevent third parties from accessing student education loan records, among other things. Some have taken to TikTok to vent their frustrations as well as give others ways to get their loans forgiven due to this data breach.
One particular creator trying to help individuals get their loans forgiven is @Scholarshipcollegemama, real name Laverne Mickens. In a video she posted to her TikTok on Feb. 9, 2025, she stated, “Elon Musk being around our sensitive, private information is a definite breach of data and a violation of FERPA.”
“I feel violated,” Mickens said in her video, following with the steps others should take to file complaints to the DOE in order to get their loans forgiven.
But filing complaints to the DOE about violations of FERPA are less likely to get peoples’ loans forgiven. FERPA does not allow for individual borrowers to file complaints to get their loans forgiven due to a violation.
So what now for the millions of financial aid receivers and student loan borrowers?
As the DOGE continues to push for numerous programs under the DOE, as well as under other agencies, to be cut and ultimately shuttered, the future remains unclear as to what the young DOGE employees and Musk plan to do after the temporary block of access to loan data goes away.