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A federal judge in Recent York has temporarily blocked Elon Musk and his team from accessing the US Treasury department’s payments data, warning that it risked resulting in the disclosure of sensitive information.
The order issued on Saturday morning is a brand new legal blow to the technology billionaire and his closest allies’ push to comb through federal payments in a bid to slash US government costs.
The court’s move got here in response to a legal challenge from 19 Democratic state attorneys-general, who argued that Musk’s unofficial “Department of Government Efficiency” unit, which was arrange by President Donald Trump, mustn’t have access to private information regarding hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Within the court order Judge Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of Recent York wrote that the “recent policy” presented a risk of “disclosure of sensitive and confidential information” and a “heightened risk that the systems in query shall be more vulnerable than before to hacking”.
He ordered that any “political appointees, special government employees, and any government worker” from outside the US Treasury needs to be restricted from accessing the agency’s data, and may destroy any information they’d obtained since Trump’s inauguration last month.
The order is anticipated to stay in place at the least until a court hearing which has been set for February 14.
The judge’s order highlights how the wide-ranging push by Trump and Musk to selectively slash government spending is facing its biggest hurdles in court, because it tests the bounds of executive power in addition to America’s privacy laws.
Earlier this week, a federal judge within the District of Columbia ruled that outsiders mustn’t be granted access to the Treasury’s payments data, in response to a separate legal challenge brought by representatives of retirees and government employees.
The White House has tried to quell fears that Musk, who has been designated a “special government worker”, is running a rogue operation. But Democrats are increasingly sounding alarm bells concerning the activities of “DOGE”.
“DOGE’s actions represent a two-front invasion of Americans’ financial security and privacy,” Ron Wyden, the highest Democrat on the Senate finance committee, wrote in a letter to the acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, which manages government pensions for hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The Treasury department didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
