DOGE staffer given green light by judge to access Treasury systems

One of Elon Musk’s DOGE surrogates has a pathway to accessing the sensitive data of millions of Americans housed in Treasury Department systems, a federal judge ruled late Friday.

Judge Jeannette A. Vargas of the District Court for the Southern District of New York partially dissolved a preliminary injunction that barred Ryan Wunderly, a DOGE liaison to Treasury, from gaining access to Bureau of Fiscal Services payment systems. 

The initial lawsuit from a group of 19 Democratic state attorneys general argued that granting Wunderly that access violated the Privacy Act and section 208 of the E-Government Act of 2002, which requires federal agencies to conduct privacy impact assessments for use of new or changed technologies involving personally identifiable information.

The PII of any American who has ever transacted with the federal government is stored in BFS systems, including names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, birth places, home addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, and bank account information.

The state AGs also argued that Treasury’s actions in approving DOGE access to these systems were “arbitrary and capricious,” a claim Vargas said the plaintiffs had “established a likelihood of success.”

But Vargas, who initially placed a hold on DOGE’s BFS permissions two months ago — writing at the time that the Trump administration’s approach was “chaotic and haphazard” — said in Friday’s order that the statutory claims under the Administrative Procedure Act were unlikely to succeed.

“It is certainly not arbitrary and capricious for the Treasury Department to determine that Wunderly should not have greater restrictions placed upon him than are imposed upon any other Treasury employee with access to BFS payment systems,” Vargas wrote. 

Going forward, Wunderly will be allowed by the court to access BFS systems after he undergoes “the proper training” that other Treasury employees with comparable permissions are subjected to. The DOGE staffer will also be required to submit a financial disclosure form. 

DOGE’s access to BFS systems has been the subject of multiple lawsuits, beginning with challenges tied to the granting of full access — rather than read-only access — to Musk associates Marko Elez and Thomas H. Krause, Jr. in the first days of the Trump administration.

Wunderly eventually took the place of Elez — who was briefly in hot water over racist social media posts — at Treasury. A court filing showed that a DOGE staffer had violated Treasury security policies by improperly sharing sensitive personal information outside the agency. 

The Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office have said they are auditing DOGE access to the BFS payment systems.