A federal judge Saturday temporarily blocked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing potentially confidential data from the Treasury Department after a lawsuit from 19 state attorneys general, including New Jersey’s.
In a four-page emergency order, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer said DOGE’s work to slash the budget and cancel contracts at the Treasury Department risks “disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking.”
Musk’s team was “restrained from granting access to any Treasury Department payment record, payment systems, or any other data systems,” Engelmayer ruled. The payment system contains sensitive personal information, including bank account details and Social Security numbers.
They were also ordered to destroy any data they downloaded since Jan. 20.
Attorney General Matt Platkin, a Democrat, celebrated the win online.
“Thanks to our lawsuit, the world’s richest man has been stopped from stealing your data,” he said in a post to X, the website formerly known as Twitter that is owned by Musk. “DOGE’s unrestricted access to Treasury systems is incredibly dangerous, and this emergency order halting their access proves it.”
The judge scheduled a hearing on Friday for the sides at the federal courthouse in New York before U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas
Musk has promised that he would cut trillions off of the federal budget at the behest of President Donald Trump who created DOGE through executive order to slash away at what he called a bloated bureaucracy. Since then, DOGE has targeted several agencies for significant cuts including USAID, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
In a follow-up post, Platkin said: “To be clear: the Judge ordered Elon and the DOGE bros to delete any data they illegally acquired since Trump took office. We are going to make sure they comply. Billionaires don’t get to write their own rules.”
Joining Platkin in filing the lawsuit are the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
This article contains information from USA Today.
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