Federal Judge Banishes Musk’s DOGE Aides From Treasury Dept. Systems

A Manhattan federal judge on Friday banned Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team from regaining access to the U.S. Treasury Department’s most sensitive payment and data systems until the conclusion of a lawsuit that claims the group’s access is unlawful.

The judge overseeing the case, Jeannette A. Vargas, ruled that members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, cannot be given access to sensitive payment systems. She said she would continue the restrictions of a temporary restraining order already in place.

Friday night’s order, the judge wrote, “bars the Treasury Department from granting access to any member of the DOGE team within the Treasury Department to any 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 case stems from a lawsuit filed by 19 state attorneys general, led by Letitia James of New York, who sued to block the Trump administration’s policy of allowing political appointees and “special government employees” who work with Mr. Musk to access the systems. The systems contain some of the country’s most sensitive information, including Americans’ bank account and Social Security data.

“Musk and DOGE are trying to wipe out vital programs and services — from health care to public safety to education — that our communities need,” Ms. James said in a statement Friday night. “I led a coalition of attorneys general to put a stop to this lawlessness, and a federal court has yet again blocked their access to our confidential information.”

White House press officials did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

The case, one of dozens filed in the country against the administration’s sweeping agenda, could test the ability of the courts to interpret and enforce the law when it runs counter to the goals of the executive branch.

When Mr. Musk’s team turned its focus to the Treasury last month, David Lebryk, who briefly served as the agency’s acting secretary, resisted the group’s efforts to access its sensitive systems. Mr. Lebryk later abruptly retired.

In recent weeks, Vice President JD Vance has claimed that judges are not allowed “to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

The attorneys general argue in their suit that only career civil servants who have received training and security clearances should have access to the systems. The untrained members of Mr. Musk’s team, they say, should not have “unfettered access.”

Lawyers for the attorneys general said in court that their concern was that Mr. Musk’s team intended to flag and pause Treasury payments based on an “ideological litmus test” and that to do so, the group had been given unlawful access to sensitive information, creating security risks.

The government has rebutted those accusations. In a hearing on Friday, a lawyer for the defendants — the Treasury Department and its secretary, Scott Bessent — said that only two DOGE members had been given access to the systems and that they had received some training, although he was not able to say how much.

The government argues that the courts cannot usurp the powers given to President Trump as the chief executive.

“There is nothing unlawful about the Treasury carrying out the new policies of the new administration using Treasury employees,” Jeffrey Stuart Oestericher, one of the government’s lawyers, said at a hearing last week.

But in her order on Friday, the judge said that the plaintiffs had “established that there is a realistic danger that confidential financial information will be disclosed.”

“More fundamentally,” Judge Vargas wrote. “There is a realistic danger that the rushed and ad hoc process that has been employed to date by the Treasury DOGE Team has increased the risk of exposure of the States’ information.”

Even the government has conceded that granting such broad access to members of the DOGE team “created heightened security risks” and that their efforts to mitigate the dangers “did not completely address those risks,” she wrote.

Matt Platkin, New Jersey’s attorney general, exulted in a post on Mr. Musk’s own X social media platform: “DOGE hackers lose again: court agrees with us that the world’s richest man can’t spy on your sensitive data.”

Mr. Musk’s group has become the central point of contention for lawsuits across the country, as its cost-cutting efforts have paralyzed parts of the federal government.

The team, created by an executive order from Mr. Trump, is tasked with trimming federal spending that is not in line with the administration’s goals. In recent weeks, DOGE — some of whose members are as young as 19 — has bulldozed through the federal bureaucracy, leaving thousands of fired employees in its wake. In some cases, the amount of money the group has claimed to cut has been overstated.

The team has often acted under a cloud of secrecy — one that has partly lifted as the government has been forced to respond to the lawsuits.

In the New York case, the administration’s lawyers said in court filings that the two people who had been given access to the Treasury systems could not edit any information and did not have access to underlying code. Both men were eventually designated as temporary employees of the Treasury Department.

But Joseph Gioeli, deputy commissioner of the department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, later said that one of the two people, Marko Elez, had mistakenly been given a higher level of access: “read/write” instead of “read-only.” Mr. Gioeli said that Mr. Elez was unaware that he had such access.

Mr. Elez resigned this month after being linked to racist posts he made on X under a pseudonym.

The administration has been unclear about Mr. Musk’s formal role with DOGE. Mr. Trump said he would lead the team, and Mr. Musk answered questions about its work during a recent news conference in the Oval Office attended by the president.

A filing on Monday in a separate case questioning DOGE’s ability to access data at seven other federal agencies complicates the picture. Joshua Fisher, a White House official, asserted in the filing that Mr. Musk was not in charge of DOGE, but merely an employee of the White House.

Mr. Fisher said in the filing that Mr. Musk was a senior adviser to the president, and had “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.”

“Mr. Musk is not the U.S. DOGE service administrator,” he wrote.

He did not say who was if not Mr. Musk.