WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed teams affiliated with the Department of Government Efficiency to gain access to potentially sensitive data on millions of Americans, overruling a lower court that had blocked that access in February.

By a 2-1 vote, a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted the access to data stored at the Treasury Department, the Education Department and the Office of Personnel Management, citing the Supreme Court's decision in a similar case in June involving Social Security data.

The decision cleared the way for teams put in place this year by Elon Musk to reclaim "high-level IT access" to government databases, Judge Julius Richardson wrote, over the objections of a number of labor unions that had sued, arguing the move

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