A federal judge approved an agreement temporarily restricting nearly all personnel associated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing financial data from the Treasury Department’s payment system.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly signed off on the temporary agreement on Wednesday with an order allowing two DOGE staffers to maintain limited access to the Treasury’s payment system.
Justice Department attorney Bradley Humphreys said Wednesday that two DOGE employees, Tom Krause, and Marko Elez, had been given read-only access to the payment system and that they had not revealed the information to anyone outside the Treasury Department, including Musk.
The agreement stands as an avenue to “preserve the status quo” until Feb. 24, when the judge can hear legal arguments regarding recent lawsuits against DOGE seeking to block the department’s access to the Treasury payments portal.
The uproar over the payments portal sparked last week when the New York Times reported Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave DOGE personnel access to the department’s payment system after they were made Treasury employees and passed government background checks and security clearances. DOGE representatives did not have operational capabilities over the payment system and had not blocked any payments, according to the report.
The news unleashed fierce criticism from Democrats, who worried that allowing Musk to access millions of people’s sensitive financial data posed a threat to the country.
“Before our very eyes, an unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. “The Musk hatchet brigade has infiltrated a gold mine of data that every foreign spy and every corrupt actor would love to see. It is a prescription for nightmares.”
The temporary agreement brokered by Judge Kollar-Kotelly allows the two men to maintain their limited access to the federal payment system. They remain prohibited from sharing data with anyone outside the agency and are forbidden to alter any records.
The agreement responds to a string of progressive unions who sued Bessent on Monday after he granted the DOGE personnel access to his department’s payment system on Jan. 31.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the Service Employees International Union, and the Alliance for Retired Americans said Bessent’s move was illegal and called for “an immediate stop” to the Treasury Department’s “systematic, continuous, and ongoing violation of federal laws that protect the privacy of personal information contained in federal records.”
In a letter to lawmakers on Tuesday, a top Treasury official pushed back on the lawsuit’s concerns, saying that Krause had “read-only access” to information.
“This is similar to the kind of access that Treasury provides to individuals reviewing Treasury systems, such as auditors, and that follows practices associated with protecting the integrity of the systems and business processes,” Jonathan Blum, the Treasury’s principal deputy assistant secretary for legislative affairs, wrote.
Although Musk vocally opposed his nomination to the Treasury chief role, calling him a “business-as-usual choice,” Bessent has defended the tech titan amid the payments controversy.
Bessent dismissed concerns about Musk during a Fox News interview Wednesday, telling the public that “At the Treasury, our payment system is not being touched.”
“We process 1.3 billion payments a year. There is a study being done — can we have more accountability, more accuracy, more traceability that the money is going where it is? But in terms of payments being stopped, that is happening upstream at the department level,” Bessent said.
Musk, he said, is “the greatest entrepreneur of this generation.”
“DOGE is not going to fail. They are moving a lot of people’s cheese here in the capital, and when you hear this squawking, then some status quo interest is not happy,” Bessent continued.
Musk has signaled he wants to use DOGE to clean out “inefficiencies” and wasteful spending from the Treasury.
“The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups. They literally never denied a payment in their entire career. Not even once,” he said in a Feb. 1 social media post.
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He wrote in a post Thursday that “billions of taxpayer dollars to known FRAUDULENT entities are STILL being APPROVED by Treasury.”
“This needs to STOP NOW!” Musk concluded.