Federal Judge Temporarily Blocks DOGE’s Access to Treasury Department Data

A federal judge temporarily blocked Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing sensitive and confidential information within the Treasury Department.

In a decision Saturday — which followed 19 state attorneys and unions suing the federal government over DOGE’s access of the Treasury’s payment system — U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer restricted DOGE and other Trump administration officials from accessing the Treasury system for at least one week, citing potential “irreparable harm,” NBC News reports.

Engelmayer’s decision also blocks the administration from “granting access to all political appointees, special government employees, and government employees detailed from an agency outside the Treasury Department, to any Treasury Department payment record, payment systems, or any other data systems maintained by the Treasury Department containing personally identifiable information and/or confidential financial information of payees.”

“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,” the judge wrote, adding that the administration must “immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.”

A hearing has been set for February 14 for arguments related to the Treasury case.

On Thursday, the threat intelligence team at the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS) — responsible for annual payments in the trillions of dollars — sent an internal email warning employees about the DOGE group’s activity. “If DOGE members have any access to payment systems, we recommend suspending that access immediately and conducting a comprehensive review of all actions they may have taken on these systems,” the team advised in the message, received by BFS’ IT department and others.

“There is reporting at other federal agencies indicating that DOGE members have performed unauthorized changes and locked civil servants out of the sensitive systems they gained access to,” the email stated. “We further recommend that DOGE members be placed under insider threat monitoring and alerting after their access to payment systems is revoked. Continued access to any payment systems by DOGE members, even ‘read only,’ likely poses the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.”