Following a complaint filed by 19 state attorneys public, including New Jersey’s, on Saturday, a federal judge temporarily revoked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency’s ability to access potentially sensitive information from the Treasury Department.
U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer cited DOGE’s efforts to cut the budget and terminate contracts with the Treasury Department in a four-page evacuation order as “disclosure of sensitive and confidential details and the increased risk that the systems in question will be more susceptible than before to hacking.”
Musk’s team was “restrained from granting access to any Treasury Department pay history, payment devices, or any other information systems”, Engelmayer ruled. Personal information that is sensitive to the payment system, such as bank account information and Social Security numbers, is stored in the payment structure.
Additionally, they were instructed to eliminate any data they had downloaded since January 20.
Attorney General Matt Platkin, a Democrat, celebrated the win internet.
The country’s richest man has been prevented from stealing your data, he claimed in a post to X, the site that Musk owned before moving on to Twitter. ” This evacuation order halting their entry proves that DOGE’s unrestricted access to Treasury techniques is incredibly unsafe,” said Doge.
U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas will appear before the judge’s panel of federal court in New York on Friday, setting up a reading for the parties.
Musk has promised to reduce billions from the federal funds at the president’s request, according to Donald Trump, who created DOGE by executive order to slash away at what he termed a bloated bureaucracy. DOGE has since targeted a number of organizations for major budget cuts, including USAID and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
In a follow-up article, Platkin said:” To be clear: the Judge ordered Elon and the DOGE brothers to remove any information they illegally acquired since Trump took office. We’ll make certain they follow our instructions. Entrepreneurs don’t get to create their own guidelines”.
Joining Platkin in filing the complaint are the lawyers 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 data from USA Today.