A United States district judge, Paul Engelmayer issued an emergency order early Saturday blocking Elon Musk’s government reform team from accessing personal and financial data for millions of Americans stored at the Treasury Department, court documents showed.
Engelmayer’s order restricts giving access to Treasury Department payment systems and other data to “all political appointees, special government employees and government employees detailed from an agency outside the Treasury Department.”
The temporary restrictive order, which remains in effect until a February 14, 2025 hearing, also says any such persons who have accessed data from the Treasury Department’s records since President Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration must “immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded.”
Musk, the world’s richest person, is leading Trump’s federal cost-cutting efforts under the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
The case was brought against the Republican president, the Department of the Treasury and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent by attorneys general from 19 states on Friday.
They alleged the administration violated the law by expanding access to sensitive treasury department data to staff from Musk’s DOGE.
The Tesla, SpaceX and X chief is neither a federal employee nor a government official, although US media reported this month that he had been registered as a “special government employee.”
DOGE does not enjoy full status as a government department, which would require approval by Congress.
But Musk, a top Trump donor and ally, and his team have rampaged through federal agencies in the first weeks of the new administration, pausing foreign aid programmes, slashing budgets and attempting to lay off scores of government workers.
Musk, in posts on X on Saturday, denounced Engelmayer as an “activist” and accused Democrats of “trying to hide possibly the biggest fraud scheme in human history!”
– ‘Unfettered access’ –
Judge Engelmayer’s order early Saturday said the states that sued would “face irreparable harm in the absence of injunctive relief.”
“That is both because of the risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking,” he wrote.
Musk ran into controversy last week with reports he and his team were accessing sensitive data stored at the treasury department.
An internal assessment from the treasury called the DOGE team’s access to federal payment systems “the single biggest insider threat the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS) has ever faced,” US media reported.
The lawsuit from states including New York and California alleged that the Trump administration granted “virtually unfettered access” to BFS payment systems to “at least one 25-year-old DOGE associate” who had the “authority to view or modify numerous critical files.”
That access “poses huge cybersecurity risks, including risks to states and states’ residents that their information will be used and processed, unchecked, in a manner not permitted by federal law,” says the state’s lawsuit filed in the US District Court in Manhattan late on Friday.
It also said that reports indicated “that data from other federal agencies is being fed into an open-source Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) system owned and controlled by a private third party.”
New Jersey Attorney-General Matthew Platkin said on Friday that Trump “has allowed an unelected billionaire to infiltrate key federal agencies and systems that store Social Security numbers, banking information and other extremely sensitive data for millions of people.”
– More challenges –
More court challenges have taken shape as Trump has moved rapidly to overhaul the government’s spending and workforce.
An attempt to overturn the constitutional guarantee to birthright citizenship has been blocked by a judge. Another judge paused an effort to offer mass buyouts to federal workers on Thursday, pending arguments next week.
The US Agency for International Development, which distributes humanitarian aid globally, has become a major target.
The Trump administration has ordered thousands of internationally-based staff to return to the US and begun slashing the USAID headcount of 10,000 employees to around 300.
Labour unions are challenging the legality of the onslaught.
A federal judge ordered a pause on Friday to a plan to put 2,200 USAID workers on paid leave by the weekend.
Democrats say it would be unconstitutional for Trump to shut down government agencies without the legislature’s green light.
AFP
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