A Federal judge in New York on Saturday temporarily blocked access to U.S. Treasury Department payment systems by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE).
Judge Paul Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York issued the order, which cites a risk that “sensitive and confidential information” could be disclosed and that systems could “be more vulnerable than before to hacking.”
The order comes after attorneys general from 19 states filed a lawsuit late Friday to try and stop DOGE from accessing Treasury Department systems. In the lawsuit, the states claim Musk has no legal power to access the systems.
Engelmayer said that any DOGE official who had been granted access to the Treasury Department systems since Jan. 20 must “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.”
Additionally, Engelmayer said representatives for the defendants – President Donald Trump, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and the Treasury Department – must now appear in court on Feb. 14. They will need to argue “why an order should not be issued” before Judge Jeannette A. Vargas, who is now handling the case on a permanent basis.
Musk said the “ruling is absolutely insane” in a Feb. 8 post on his social media platform X. Musk also issued a separate post calling Engelmayer, “A corrupt judge protecting corruption,” adding, “He needs to be impeached NOW!”
New York Attorney General Letitia James issued her own Feb. 8 post on X, reiterating that, “Musk and his DOGE employees must destroy all records they’ve obtained,” adding, “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: no one is above the law.”
This is just the latest ruling to go against Musk’s DOGE team, which has spent the last couple of weeks infiltrating Federal agencies to look for fraud, waste, and abuse.
Last week, lawyers for the Justice Department agreed to temporarily restrict the DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems. This came after a coalition of labor organizations filed a lawsuit against the Treasury Department for allegedly sharing confidential data with the DOGE.
That order allowed two DOGE employees to continue seeing department data. However, their access to the payment records was limited to “read only.”
Musk and his associates were granted access to Treasury’s payment systems the same weekend they announced they would shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development and locked career civil servants out of the Office of Personnel Management computer systems.
