Trump DOJ seeks reversal of judge’s order to block access to Treasury systems
A day after a federal judge in New York cut off Department of Government Efficiency access to Treasury Department financial systems, the Trump administration asked a different judge to reverse what it called a “remarkable intrusion” on the executive branch’s constitutional powers.
In an early Saturday filing, Judge Paul A. Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction in response to a lawsuit filed by 19 state attorneys general that sought a temporary restraining order to halt Elon Musk’s DOGE surrogates — defined as political or “special government” employees — from accessing Bureau of Fiscal Services payment systems.
Allowing that access to continue, the state AGs argued, opened the door for “the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking.” Information stored in those systems includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, birth places, home addresses and telephone numbers, email addresses, and bank account information of Americans who have transacted with the federal government.
Engelmayer granted the emergency relief, and ordered any person in that category of employees who accessed that information since Jan. 20 to “immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.”
On Sunday, the Department of Justice lawyers asked Judge Jeannette Vargas, also of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York, to dissolve, clarify or modify the temporary restraining order, writing that the injunction was “markedly overbroad” and contained “no sound reason that it should extend to Treasury’s leadership.”
The Trump lawyers contended that there is no basis for drawing a difference between civil servants and political appointees, and preventing the latter from performing its functions “is an extraordinary and unprecedented judicial interference with a Cabinet Secretary’s ability to oversee the Department he was constitutionally appointed to lead.”
The temporary restraining order and Trump’s pushback against it are just the latest bit of legal fallout from Musk’s move to unleash his underlings on the sensitive Treasury systems. A coalition of union groups sued the Treasury Department and Secretary Scott Bessent to cut off DOGE access, and a federal judge last week partially blocked that access.
The potential security failures involved with DOGE access to Americans’ personal and financial data have left cybersecurity experts aghast and led to legislative action from House Democrats.
