The Trump administration said that a judge’s order blocking Elon Musk’s government efficiency team from accessing Treasury Department payment systems wrongfully prevents Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent from doing his job, adding a new wrinkle to a fight over the handling of the sensitive payment data.
In a filing Sunday, the government argued that a temporary restraining order limiting “all political appointees” from accessing the data should be vacated because it ties the hands of high-level employees like Bessent, his chief of staff and his deputy secretary.
The temporary order was issued in a lawsuit brought by a group of states seeking to stop Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency from accessing systems containing personal the information on millions of Americans who receive a wide array of payments from the federal government.
But the government said the order was a “remarkable intrusion” on the executive branch and offered no distinction between political appointees and civil servants who can access the data.
Trump created DOGE by executive order and appointed Musk to lead what they describe as an effort to modernize federal technology and identify spending cuts. Since then, the Trump administration has been hit with several lawsuits over its policies.
The temporary order, granted hours after the suit was filed, applies broadly to DOGE employees as well as political appointees. The government said in the filing that Trump, Bessent and the Treasury Department have taken all the appropriate steps to comply with the order.
“But this is not a durable status quo,” the Justice Department said, adding that limiting access by Treasury’s senior leadership “is overbroad.”
“Although these high-level officials do not ordinarily need to access or receive data from such systems, it is the responsibility of these officials — the appointees of a duly elected President — to receive information they require to carry out their mandate to govern the agency in accordance with the President’s priorities,” the U.S. said.
A judge ordered lawyers for the Justice Department and the group of states to try to reach a deal on whether to amend the TRO to allow political appointees to access the data while keeping DOGE locked out. If no deal is reached, the states will respond to the DOJ’s motion by 5 p.m. New York time.
The office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the multi-state suit, declined to comment.
The judge granted the temporary restraining order after concluding that the states were likely to win the case on the merits, at least based on the evidence so far. The judge also ordered the destruction of any Treasury data gathered or copied by DOGE so far.
The order temporarily bars Treasury from “granting access to all political appointees, special government employees, and government employees detailed from an agency outside the Treasury Department.” The judge also ordered unqualified individuals who gained access to the disputed data since Jan. 20 to “immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.”
The lawsuit is the latest in a wave of challenges to the president’s executive orders and other actions since he took office last month. On Monday, a federal judge in New Hampshire became the latest to issue a nationwide injunction against Trump’s executive order restricting so-called birthright citizenship, saying a nonprofit that sued was likely to win the case.
A hearing on a longer lasting injunction against DOGE access is set for Feb. 14 in Manhattan.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM
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