A federal judge in New York extended a ban prohibiting Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment system.
U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas issued a ruling on Friday granting a preliminary injunction requested by 19 Democratic state attorneys general to keep DOGE from accessing the records while the case plays out in court.
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Vargas argued that Treasury officials allowed two DOGE employees to access the payment system in a “rushed and ad hoc” manner that created a “realistic danger that confidential financial information will be disclosed.”
Trump has countered that court rulings against DOGE’s investigation into the Treasury are usurping him of exercising lawful presidential powers.
“Any court that would say that the president or his representatives, like secretary of the treasury, secretary of state, whatever, doesn’t have the right to go over their books and make sure everything’s honest — I mean, how can you have a country? You can’t have anything that way. You can’t have a business that way,” he said during a press conference earlier this month. “I hope that the court system is going to allow us to do what we have to do. We got elected to, among other things, find all of this fraud, abuse, all of this, this horrible stuff going on.”
But Vargas said DOGE’s investigation could pose a significant risk to the integrity of the portal system.
“The process by which the Treasury DOGE Team was appointed, brought on board, and provided with access to [Bureau of the Fiscal Service] payment systems could have been implemented in a measured, reasonable, and thoughtful way,” Vargas wrote. “To date, based on the record currently before the Court, it does not appear that this has been the case.”
The Friday ruling follows similar restrictions imposed on DOGE by another federal judge in New York earlier this month. Both rulings overturned a prior decision by a federal judge in Washington D.C., that granted two DOGE employees limited access to the Treasury payment portal.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Musk have argued DOGE’s scrutiny of the payment system is necessary to modernize the bureaucracy, make it more efficient, and save taxpayer dollars.
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During an appearance in the Oval Office with Trump earlier this month, Musk said that “basic controls” tracking and categorizing potentially trillions of dollars worth of payments were missing from the system. What DOGE is seeking to do, he said, was “adding common sense controls that should be present, that haven’t been present.”
“Basic controls that should be in place, that are in place in any company, such as making sure that any given payment has a payment categorization code, that there is a comment field that describes the payment, and that if a payment is on the Do Not Pay list, that you don’t actually pay it — none of those things are true currently,” he said. “It’s like just a massive number of blank checks just flying out the building so you can’t reconcile blank checks. You’ve got comment fields that are also blanks so you don’t know why the payment was made.”
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Before judges blocked DOGE from examining the Treasury Department’s payment portal, which sends out trillions in payments, Musk also said his department had found problems with Social Security payments going out to dead or anonymous people.
“There’s crazy things like — just a cursory examination of Social Security, and we’ve got people in there that are 150 years old,” he said. “And then that a whole bunch of Social Security payments where there’s no identifying information. Well, why is there no identifying information?”