A federal judge early yesterday temporarily restricted access by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems, saying there was a risk of “irreparable harm,” reports The New York Times.
The Trump administration’s new policy of allowing political appointees and “special government employees” access to these systems, which contain highly sensitive information such as bank details, heightens the risk of leaks and of the systems becoming more vulnerable than before to hacking, US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said in an emergency order.
Judge Engelmayer ordered any such official who had been granted access to the systems since January 20 to “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.” He also restricted the Trump administration from granting access to those categories of officials.
The defendants – President Trump, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the Treasury Department – must appear on Friday before Judge Jeannette A. Vargas, who is handling the case on a permanent basis, Judge Engelmayer said.
The situation could pose a fundamental test of America’s rule of law. If the administration fails to comply with the emergency order, it is unclear how it might be enforced. The Constitution says that a president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” but courts have rarely been tested by a chief executive who has ignored their orders.
Federal officials have sometimes responded to adverse decisions with dawdling or grudging compliance. Outright disobedience is exceedingly rare. There has been no clear example of “open presidential defiance of court orders in the years since 1865,” according to a Harvard Law Review article published in 2018.
Yesterday’s order came in response to a lawsuit filed on Friday by Letitia James of New York along with 18 other Democratic state attorneys general, charging that when Trump had given Musk the run of government computer systems, he had breached protections enshrined in the Constitution and “failed to faithfully execute the laws enacted by Congress.”
The lawsuit was joined by the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin.
They said the president had given “virtually unfettered access” to the federal government’s most sensitive information to young aides who worked for Musk.
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