A U.S. District Judge, Paul A. Engelmayer, issued an emergency order early Saturday barring Elon Musk’s government reform team from accessing personal and financial data stored at the Treasury Department, according to court documents.
The order restricts access to Treasury Department payment systems and other sensitive data for “all political appointees, special government employees, and government employees detailed from agencies outside the Treasury Department.”
The temporary order, effective until a hearing scheduled for February 14, also mandates that anyone who accessed Treasury Department data since Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20 must “immediately destroy all copies of material downloaded.”
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is heading Trump’s federal cost-cutting initiative under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The case, filed on Friday by attorneys general from 19 states, names Trump, the Department of the Treasury, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as defendants. The plaintiffs allege that the administration unlawfully expanded access to sensitive Treasury data for personnel from Musk’s DOGE team.
Engelmayer’s order said the states that sued would “face irreparable harm in the absence of injunctive relief.”
“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,” he wrote.
Musk ran into controversy last week with reports he and his team were accessing sensitive data stored at the Treasury Department.
An internal assessment from the Treasury called the DOGE team’s access to federal payment systems “the single biggest insider threat the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced,” US media reported.