A legal battle has resulted in an organization headed by Elon Musk being unable to access billions of dollars in funds.
Recently, reports have surfaced that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was granted access to the U.S. Treasury Department’s payment system.
DOGE is a provisional body established by President Trump aimed at ‘dismantling Government Bureaucracy, cutting excess regulations, reducing wasteful expenditures, and restructuring Federal Agencies’.
Trump announced its formation in November and appointed Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the organization.
Since then, it has been reported that the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, permitted a team under DOGE to supervise the Treasury’s payment system. This system handles the distribution of Americans’ tax returns, Social Security benefits, disability payments, and federal employees’ salaries, amounting to over $6 trillion in flow.
Team members are believed to have had access to this critical payment system since January 20, the day Trump assumed office. However, a federal judge has temporarily suspended this access.
On February 8, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer issued an order requiring DOGE members to erase any downloaded information from the payment system, as reported by CNN.
Judge Engelmayer stated that the new policy posed a risk of disclosing sensitive and confidential information and increased the vulnerability of the systems to potential hacking.
A hearing on the issue is set for Friday, February 14.
The order follows a lawsuit filed by 19 State Attorney Generals against the Trump administration, accusing DOGE of unauthorized access to sensitive data.
According to CBS News, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed the lawsuit yesterday, with attorneys general from Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin joining the case.
The lawsuit claims: “Nineteen States bring this action against Treasury, the Treasury Secretary, and the President to put an end to this new dangerous expanded access policy.”
It also notes that ‘only a limited number of career civil servants at BFS with the appropriate security clearance had access to the BFS payment systems’ before DOGE was granted access.
Concerns have been raised that the actions of DOGE members ‘pose a unique security risk to the States and State residents whose data is held’.
In response to these concerns, the Treasury has previously stated that DOGE members are granted ‘read-only’ access, preventing them from altering the payment system’s expenditures.