- A trio of federal unions wants a judge to block the sharing of Americans’ sensitive data with DOGE.
- On Wednesday, they asked a judge to immediately stop the Treasury Department from doing so.
- A Treasury lawyer told the judge that no one at DOGE has direct access to the data.
A federal judge said Wednesday that she may immediately block the Treasury Department from directly sharing the personal financial data of millions of Americans with Elon Musk’s DOGE.
US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who sits in Washington, DC., made the announcement after an hourlong court hearing, during which a government lawyer said only two Musk allies — both of them now Treasury employees — have any access to the data.
That contention was met with skepticism from one of the lawyers seeking to ensure the data’s privacy.
“We remain concerned that the records — the personal information of our association’s members — are still compromised,” said the lawyer, Nandan Joshi, who represents three unions in a lawsuit against Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent filed on Monday.
“If there’s a compromise, it’s impossible to unbreak the egg,” Joshi said.
Treasury officials have so far not been forthcoming on what access the two Musk allies have to the data, Joshi told the judge. The two were identified in court as Cloud Software Group CEO Tom Krause and Marko Elez, who has worked at SpaceX and X, formerly Twitter.
“We don’t take it as a given that two individuals by themselves, without outside assistance, will manage the supposed task of rooting out fraud, waste, and abuse in a system that handles over a billion payments a year, and trillions and trillions of dollars of payments,” he said.
The lawyer representing Bessent and the Treasury Department, Bradley P. Humphreys, countered during the hearing that only Elez has direct access to the data, and that “he briefs and reports to Mr. Krause, who does not have direct access.”
“Only those two individuals have been given any access,” Humphreys said, adding that as special government employees of the Treasury Department, both are subject to federal ethics and confidentiality requirements.
“Have they disseminated any of that information to anybody else?” the judge asked Humphreys.
“As far as we are aware, no they have not, outside of the Treasury Department,” including to Musk, Humphreys said.
“So he has nothing to do with the records, if he’s not at Treasury?” the judge asked of Musk.
“He is associated with the United States DOGE Service, and with the executive office of the president, as a special government employee” Humphreys answered.
“However, our understanding is that the information derived from the systems at issue in this case is not being transmitted to him outside of the Treasury Department,” Humphreys added of Musk. “He is not in the Treasury Department.”
“Does he have access to it? Can he go look at it? Has he gone and looked at it?” the judge asked.
“No, your honor. To our knowledge he has not,” Humphreys answered.
The judge had told the lawyers for both sides that she was ready to put a potential order in place that would keep it that way, with no one beyond Krause and Elez having access to the data, at least for now.
The sides were given until 6 p.m. to reach an agreement on the language for the order. When they failed to reach that agreement, she told them to try again overnight.
“It sounds like you’re very close” on the wording, she told them when the parties reconvened at 6 p.m.
The Bessent lawsuit challenges what it calls the Treasury’s ongoing release to DOGE of sensitive data from anyone who pays federal taxes, collects Social Security, or otherwise engages financially with the government.
Lawyers for the unions asked to block the sharing of this Treasury data with DOGE while the lawsuit proceeds.
The Treasury and Bessent “have unlawfully implemented and are unlawfully maintaining a system that enables records and information about individuals to be accessed and disclosed to unauthorized parties,” the unions have argued in court documents.
“The scale of the intrusion into individuals’ privacy is massive and unprecedented,” the unions argued.
The lawsuit was filed by the Plaintiffs Alliance for Retired Americans, American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO, and Service Employees International Union, AFL-CIO. It alleges that releasing the names and financial details of people in the Treasury’s database would violate federal data-privacy law and Internal Revenue Service regulations.
February 5, 2025 — This story was updated to include details for a second hearing held at 6 p.m. Wednesday.
