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MANHATTAN (CN) — The Trump administration is asking a federal judge to throw out a temporary restraining order imposed over the weekend that bars billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing sensitive personal data stored on the Treasury Department’s central payment system.
In the motion filed just before midnight on Sunday, administration lawyers say that the emergency injunction put in place late Friday is “markedly overbroad” in restricting all political appointees, special government employees, and non-Treasury federal employees from accessing and potentially rewriting code on data systems within the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service payment platform.
The pause came in response to a constitutional challenge by attorneys general in Democratic states to the access Musk’s team of DOGE engineers has to the Treasury system, which controls trillions in federal spending.
“There is no sound reason that it should extend to Treasury’s leadership, who are charged with overseeing and administering the department without interruption,” President Donald Trump’s administration wrote in the petition to vacate the injunction.
“To the extent the order applies to senior political appointees at Treasury, it is an extraordinary and unprecedented judicial interference with a cabinet secretary’s ability to oversee the department he was constitutionally appointed to lead. Interfering with those basic functions, even for a day, will cause irreparable harm to the government,” they wrote.
The order, signed by the Barack Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer, draws an impermissible distinction between “civil servants” and “political appointees,” the Trump administration argues.
Musk installed Tom Krause, a former Silicon Valley software executive with ties to DOGE, as the new financial assistant secretary at the Treasury.
Krause, who is listed online as the CEO of Cloud Software Group, works at the department as a special government employee and is subject to less stringent rules on ethics and financial disclosures than other federal workers. The department’s acting deputy secretary, David Lebryk, reportedly resigned after more than thirty years of service when Krause and DOGE requested access to sensitive data.
DOGE reportedly gained access to several sensitive systems responsible for Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, tax refunds and thousands of other functions.
Besides Krause, the Trump administration says, only one other Treasury employee — 25-year-old Marko Elez — had “read only” access to or copies of certain data in the Treasury’s payment systems, subject to restrictions, and access to a copy of certain Bureau of the Fiscal Service payments systems’ source code in a “sandbox” environment.
Elez resigned on Feb. 6, 2025 after past online posts he made supporting racism and eugenics surfaced; he returned all Treasury equipment and credentials the same day.
The administration argues that the states didn’t sufficiently show how they would suffer irreparable harm as a result of Trump’s appointed Treasury leadership being excluded from the temporary injunction.
The litigation comes amid a swirl of controversy around efforts by Musk and members of DOGE to cut federal spending and root out purported fraud, while reducing the federal workforce and readjusting or eliminating certain government agencies — efforts that have sparked an ever-increasing number of legal challenges.
Democratic legislators have voiced frustration over the lack of transparency and public accountability, saying that Musk’s team of loyalists could illegally withhold payments to suit their political agenda.
Musk has moved to drastically overhaul the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Treasury Department, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Education since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
Speaking to pool reporters during an in-flight news conference on Air Force One after leaving the 2025 NFL Super Bowl in New Orleans, Trump called judges’ orders to block DOGE’s access “a disgrace.”
“We have tremendous fraud, tremendous waste and tremendous abuse, and theft, by the way, and the day you’re not allowed to look for theft and fraud, and abuse, then we don’t have much of a country,” he said Sunday evening.
Vice President JD Vance echoed Trump’s condemnation of the judicial interference blocking their executive agenda, writing in a social media post on Sunday: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” Vance wrote on the Musk-owned X.com. “If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal.”
Musk, who spent at least $277 million to back Trump in the 2024 presidential election, condemned Engelmayer’s intervention in the case, repeatedly invoking the judge’s removal in several posts on X the following night: “A corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW!”
The Trump administration requested that the restraining order be stayed pending appeal if their petition to vacate is unsuccessful.
The next hearing in the states’ case in Manhattan federal court over DOGE employees’ access to sensitive personal data on the Treasury payment platform is scheduled for Friday.
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