A case that could test the ability of other branches of government to act as a check on the Trump administration will begin Friday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, where a judge will hear arguments over whether Elon Musk and his cost-cutting team should be granted access to the Treasury Department’s most sensitive payment and data systems.
On Saturday, a U.S. district judge in Manhattan, Paul A. Engelmayer, ordered that Mr. Musk and his team, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, be temporarily restricted from the Treasury’s systems, saying there was a risk of “irreparable harm.” The group’s access heightened the risk of leaks and hacking, Judge Engelmayer wrote.
The order was in response to a suit filed last week by 19 state attorneys general, led by Letitia James of New York. The officials argued that the Trump administration’s new policy of allowing political appointees and “special government employees” such as Mr. Musk to access these systems was unlawful.
Federal prosecutors defending President Trump and the Treasury Department have argued that the courts do not have the right to usurp the president’s power to give access to federal agencies to whomever he chooses. The restrictions on Mr. Musk’s team, they wrote, are keeping the Treasury from making “management decisions within its lawful discretion regarding its own technological systems.”
On Friday, both sides will appear before a different federal judge, Jeannette A. Vargas, to make their case.
The attorneys general are seeking a ruling from the judge that would bar Mr. Musk and his team from the systems until there is a final determination in the case.
The lawsuit is one of dozens of challenges that have sprung up in response to Mr. Trump’s sweeping agenda in the first few weeks of his administration. Federal courts have served as the fastest path to temporary relief for federal employees, states and individuals concerned with the president’s new policies.
Barry Sullivan, a professor of constitutional law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, said that America’s founders did not expect that the courts would become the first line of defense against executive power. They thought that the Senate and House of Representatives would want to protect their own powers and act as a check on the president.
“The framers did not anticipate the rise of political parties,” he said. “They certainly didn’t anticipate that the pull of party affiliation could be so strong that senators would think of themselves as members of the political party first and senators second.”
Over the last 20 years, the Supreme Court has also increased the power of the presidency, Mr. Sullivan said, through the so-called unitary executive theory, which contends that executive power belongs solely to the president. Mr. Sullivan said the main question now was whether the court would recognize any constitutional basis for agency independence.
“Clearly,” he said, “the Department of Justice has decided that it will no longer continue to support agency independence.”
The attorneys general argue in their lawsuit that Mr. Musk’s cost-cutting team has been given “unfettered access” to the Treasury Department’s most fundamental systems, which include Americans’ bank account and Social Security data, and that in the past, access to those systems was limited to a small number of career civil servants with security clearances. The suit also says that Mr. Musk’s team intends to cancel Treasury payments that have already been authorized by Congress.
The Trump administration has defended the cost-cutting efforts. Over the weekend, Vice President JD Vance said that judges were not allowed “to control the executive’s legitimate power,” although U.S. courts have long engaged in the practice of judicial review.
In initial filings this week, the federal prosecutors defending the administration said that only two people designated as special government employees had been given access to the Treasury’s systems and that the access was “over the shoulder,” meaning the workers could not edit any information and did not have access to code.
However, Joseph Gioeli, the deputy commissioner of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service at the Treasury, later said there had been a mistake that allowed one of the men, Marko Elez, to have greater access. Mr. Elez, a 25-year-old former staff member at X, had been designated as a temporary Treasury employee and briefly been given “read/write permissions instead of read-only,” which Mr. Gioeli said Mr. Elez was unaware he had.
Leadership teams at the bureau and the Treasury “were fully aware of the risks presented by Mr. Elez’s work and sought to mitigate those risks to the extent possible,” Mr. Gioeli said.
At the center of the legal battle between the administration and the attorneys general is “the nerve center of our payment systems,” said Yesha Yadav, a law professor and associate dean at Vanderbilt University. The importance of these systems “cannot be overstated,” she said.
If promised payments are delayed or left unpaid, government agencies could be vulnerable to legal action, she said, and there could be ripple effects for people who depend on benefits like Social Security.
“We’ve never imagined the U.S. government being in potential default in these kinds of domestic obligations,” Ms. Yadav said, adding: “This is about as precious of a data source that we have.”
When working with these systems, it’s important to “operate with extreme care,” said Jacob Leibenluft, who held senior positions at the Treasury and at the Office of Management and Budget during the Biden administration. “I think there are many reasons to doubt that this particular team is doing so,” he said.
Mr. Musk, backed by his young team of enforcers, at least one of whom is 19, has bulldozed through federal agencies in recent weeks, announcing hundreds of millions in cuts and firing federal employees. Last week, a federal judge in Washington ordered a pause on an effort by the administration to place 2,200 employees with the U.S. Agency for International Development on leave, a move Mr. Musk played a central role in, according to a lawsuit filed to stop it.
When Mr. Musk and his team turned their sights to the Treasury Department at the end of January, David Lebryk, a career civil servant who had briefly served as acting Treasury secretary, resisted their requests for access. He was put on leave and later resigned.
Mr. Leibenluft said it was concerning that Mr. Trump’s political allies were jumping into these sensitive systems without training or the appropriate clearances.
“It shows a real lack of appreciation for the risks, even inadvertently, they could be causing to the American people,” he said.
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