(Photo by Kena Betancur/VIEWpress)
A group of state attorneys general is preparing to sue to stop Elon Musk’s "DOGE" team from accessing data at the US Treasury Department, calling it a flagrant breach of US law.
"This level of access for unauthorized individuals is unlawful, unprecedented, and unacceptable,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said on Thursday.
James is leading a coalition of 14 Democratic state attorneys general from jurisdictions including Arizona, California, and Nevada. Their lawsuit will seek to halt Musk’s unofficial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing payment systems at the Treasury Department, which includes bank account and Social Security data.
Musk has defended the access, saying the goal of DOGE—an office within the executive branch established by President Trump via executive order—is to identify and stop government waste.
Still, the effort has sparked major controversy, partly because Musk’s staffers—a group of 19- to 24-year-olds—have been granted access to the most sensitive US data at a growing number of government agencies without going through federal privacy and security reviews.
In response, AG James accused Musk of acting above the law. "The President does not have the power to give away our private information to anyone he chooses, and he cannot cut federal payments approved by Congress," she says.
“DOGE has no authority to access this information, which they explicitly sought in order to block critical payments that millions of Americans rely on —payments that support health care, childcare, and other essential programs,” James added, referencing DOGE's effort to shut down spending at the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
Union groups representing federal employees have filed their own lawsuit, claiming DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department violates federal law by allowing them to see sensitive records of Americans without their consent. "Retirees, taxpayers, federal employees, companies, and other individuals from all walks of life have no assurance that their information will receive the protection that federal law affords," the lawsuit says.
The White House claims that DOGE employees had "read-only" access to sensitive data, meaning they couldn't make changes. But Wired reports that staffers installed by Musk "had the ability to rewrite the code of the payment system." On Thursday, US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly limited access to the payment system to two staffers in a read-only capacity, The Wall Street Journal reports. One of those staffers, Marko Elez, resigned later that day after the WSJ discovered a trove of racist posts on a now-deleted X account.
Musk is now attacking the journalist who wrote the story about Elez, suggesting that her previous work for USAID is "possibly criminal," and sharing posts calling the WSJ "completely compromised." He's also polling his X followers on whether Elez should return to his post. As of this writing, nearly 80% of the approximately 288,000 accounts that have voted say yes.