A U.S. District Judge, Paul Engelmayer, has issued an emergency injunction preventing Elon Musk’s cost-cutting government reform team from accessing personal and financial data stored at the Treasury Department, according to court documents released on Saturday.
Engelmayer’s order bars Treasury Department access for “all political appointees, special government employees, and government employees detailed from an agency outside the Treasury Department.”
This restriction will remain in place until a scheduled hearing on February 14, 2025.
The order further mandates that any individuals who have already accessed Treasury records since President Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20 must “immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded.”
Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and X, has been leading the Trump administration’s cost-cutting initiative under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
However, his involvement has raised legal concerns.
The lawsuit against the Trump administration, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and the Department of the Treasury was filed by attorneys general from 19 states, who claim the administration violated federal law by granting Musk’s DOGE team access to sensitive Treasury data.
Although Musk has been classified as a “special government employee,” he is not a federal worker or government official.
Additionally, DOGE has not received congressional approval to operate as an official government department.
Since Trump’s return to office, Musk and his team have aggressively pushed to reduce federal spending, halt foreign aid programs, and lay off large numbers of government employees.
Reacting to the court order, Musk took to X, where he called Engelmayer an “activist” judge and accused Democrats of “trying to hide possibly the biggest fraud scheme in human history!”
In his ruling, Judge Engelmayer emphasized the urgency of restricting access, stating that without legal intervention, the plaintiff states would “face irreparable harm.”
“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,” Engelmayer wrote.
The controversy surrounding Musk’s team intensified last week after reports suggested they had direct access to classified Treasury data.
According to an internal Treasury Department assessment, the DOGE team’s involvement posed “the single biggest insider threat the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS) has ever faced,” U.S. media reported.
The lawsuit, filed in a Manhattan federal court by states including California and New York, alleges that at least one 25-year-old DOGE associate was given “virtually unfettered access” to BFS payment systems, with the ability to “view or modify numerous critical files.”
The suit warns that this level of 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.”
Additionally, it claims that data from various 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 condemned the situation, saying, “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.”
This latest case is one of several legal challenges facing the Trump administration as it moves aggressively to reshape government operations.
A judge has already blocked Trump’s attempt to revoke birthright citizenship, while another recently halted an initiative offering mass buyouts to federal employees.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which manages humanitarian aid, has been significantly impacted by the administration’s policies. Trump has ordered thousands of overseas USAID staff to return to the U.S. and is working to slash the agency’s workforce from 10,000 to just 300 employees.
Labor unions have pushed back, and on Friday, a federal judge temporarily halted the administration’s plan to place 2,200 USAID workers on paid leave.
Democrats argue that Trump’s efforts to dismantle government agencies without congressional approval violate constitutional principles.
