A Manhattan Federal Court judge on Friday extended the temporary restraining order that bars staffers from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency from accessing US Treasury Department data—which attorneys general from New York and other blue states have slammed as an unlawful threat to privacy—while she considers whether to impose a longer-term injunction.
After hearing some two hours of arguments, Judge Jeannette A. Vargas told lawyers for New York and allied states, and their opponents from the Department of Justice, “I do find good cause to extend the TRO as modified.” Vargas said she would soon issue her decision, but not today, to “give the court time to consider” the issues.
While the proceeding largely maintained the status quo, it also lifted the veil on just how little is known about DOGE’s access to information—and where it went.
When Vargas asked Jeffrey Oestericher, the Justice Department attorney representing Trump, on Friday whether any DOGE-accessed information had been shared outside of the Treasury Department, he said: “The short answer on that is we don’t presently know.”
“We’re performing a forensic analysis. What we can tell from the forensic analysis thus far is there were emails sent outside Treasury,” Oestericher said. “We do not know [the] content.”
Vargas asked: Wasn’t this problematic from a privacy standpoint?
“The short answer is ‘no,’” Oestericher said.
“During this time that the DOGE team members had access to this information, there were extensive mitigation efforts in place to prevent this precise harm.”
But, Oestericher admitted at another point, “We candidly admit that there was some measure of increased risk but we took all appropriate mitigation measures to mitigate that risk as much as possible.”
Vargas’s decision came six days after New York and allied litigants were granted a temporary restraining order that ultimately prohibited the Treasury Department from giving DOGE hires and special government employees access to sensitive data and computer systems. Donald Trump tapped Elon Musk to head DOGE, an agency the president created under the auspices of rooting out fraud and governmental waste—despite a dearth of evidence indicating fraud.
In issuing that temporary restraining order early February 8, Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said that the states suing Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent would “face irreparable harm in the absence of injunctive relief.”
Engelmayer noted that Treasury’s new policy, enacted at Trump’s direction, appears to allegedly “[expand] access to the paytment systems of the Bureau of Fiscal Services (BFS) to political appointees and ‘special government employees.’”
This, Engelmayer reasoned, represented a “risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking.”
Engelmayer also said in his written decision that the states suing over Treasury’s policy change “have shown a likelihood of success on the merits of their claims, with the States’ statutory claims presenting as particularly strong.”
The complaint against Trump and Bessent repeatedly cited WIRED’s reporting that revealed how a 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, with ties to Musk, enjoyed read and write access to two Treasury Department systems responsible for virtually all payments made by the federal government. Tom Krause—who is on the DOGE team despite being CEO of Cloud Software Group—was also granted access to these capabilities.
