US judge blocks Musk’s Doge reform team from Treasury data

WASHINGTON – A US judge issued an emergency order on Feb 8 blocking billionaire Elon Musk’s government reform team from accessing personal and financial data stored at the Treasury Department.

District Judge Paul Engelmayer’s order restricts giving access to US Treasury Department payment systems and other data to “all political appointees, special government employees, and government employees detailed from an agency outside the Treasury Department”.

The temporary restrictive order, which remains in effect until a Feb 14 hearing, also says any such person who has accessed data from the US Treasury Department’s records since Mr Donald Trump was inaugurated as president on Jan 20 must “immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded”.

Mr Musk, on X, called the ruling “absolutely insane!” and said without evidence that “something super shady is going to protect scammers.”

“How on Earth are we supposed to stop fraud and waste of taxpayer money without looking at how money is spent?“ Musk said on his social media platform, and called Mr Engelmayer “an activist posing as a judge.”

Mr Musk, the world’s richest person, is leading Mr Trump’s

federal cost-cutting efforts

under the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).

The case was brought against Mr Trump, the US Department of the Treasury and US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Feb 7 by attorneys-general from 19 states.

The attorneys-general alleged the administration violated the law by expanding access to sensitive US Treasury Department data to staff from Mr Musk’s Doge.

The lawsuit said Mr Musk and his team could disrupt federal funding for health clinics, preschools, climate initiatives, and other programs, and that Mr Trump could use the information to further his political agenda.

Doge’s access to the system also “poses huge cybersecurity risks that put vast amounts of funding for the States and their residents in peril”, the state attorneys-general said. 

Judge Engelmayer’s order said the states that sued would “face irreparable harm in the absence of injunctive relief”.

“That is both because of the risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking,” he wrote.

The judge also directed that anyone prohibited under his order from accessing those systems to immediately destroy anything they copied or downloaded.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat whose office is leading the case, in a social media post said the order prevents Mr Musk, the world’s richest person, from accessing Americans’ private data.

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: no one is above the law,” Ms James wrote on Mr Musk’s social media platform X.

The White House and Treasury Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mr Musk ran into controversy last week with reports he and his team were

accessing sensitive data stored at the US Treasury Department.

Mr Musk’s efforts have alarmed Democrats and advocacy groups who say he is overstepping his authority by seeking to dismantle agencies responsible for critical government programs and fire federal workers en masse.

Mr Bessent, a Trump appointee, said this week that the department’s payment system will not be touched by Mr Musk and that any decisions to stop payments would be made by other agencies.

An internal assessment from the Treasury called the Doge team’s access to federal payment systems “the single biggest insider threat the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced”, the US media reported. AFP, REUTERS