Judge extends order blocking Musk’s DOGE team from Treasury payment system

A federal judge on Friday extended a temporary order that blocks Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team from accessing payment systems within the Treasury Department. 

The extension comes after 19 state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over DOGE’s access to the payment system, which has information about Americans’ Social Security, Medicare and veterans’ benefits, tax refund information, and much more. 

The lawsuit claims the Musk-run agency illegally accessed the Treasury Department’s central payment system at the Trump administration’s behest. 

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The lawsuit was filed in New York by New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office and includes attorneys general from Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin. 

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U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas in Manhattan on Friday said that she wasn’t going to issue a ruling yet on the attorneys general request for a longer preliminary injunction, leaving the temporary order issued last Saturday in place.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told FOX Business last week that the concerns about DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department are not valid. 

“DOGE is not going to fail,” he said. “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.”

He continued, “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.”

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The newly-created DOGE aims to cut government waste and has been given access to more than a dozen government agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of Education and the Department of Labor.