DOGE Drops In Court

Unless they were just lying to the judge.

Since Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency skinsuited into the United States Digital Service, his underlings have serially colonized every executive agency like termites. A deranged billionaire is reshaping our federal government to suit his own whims. It is not an exaggeration to call this a coup.

One of the most alarming events of the past two weeks is DOGE’s takeover of Treasury Department, particularly the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). The BFS is the government’s payment processing department, cutting a billion “checks” totaling nearly seven trillion dollars a year. In reality, most of those aren’t paper checks, but electronic transfers covering everything from social security to education grants for individual states.

DOGE’s seizure of BFS is catastrophic on several fronts. From a political standpoint, it provides an ideal venue for illegal impoundment of funds allocated by Congress. If Trump and Musk decide to punish California for letting trans girls play sports, they can just cut off the money at the spigot and force the state to go to court to get the tap turned back on.

From a technical standpoint, monkeying with BFS’s shockingly antiquated code could cause the whole system to implode, meaning that no money at all could go out the door. When Twitter crashed because Musk laid off 80 percent of the staff, it was merely annoying. If the US government crashes, we could be looking at a default on the national debt and a government shutdown in the same week. Not great, Bob!

It’s also a disaster for data privacy and a violation of federal law to allow unauthorized access to sensitive financial data of every man, woman, child, and corporation in the US. Specifically, the Privacy Act of 1974 regulates how government agencies can use and storage of sensitive personal data. And the BFS is the motherlode of highly sensitive personal information on anyone who has ever made a payment to or received a payment from the federal government. That includes names, dates of birth, telephone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses, and Social Security numbers, along with routing and bank account numbers. Additionally, BFS maintains records on people who owe money to the government, including “information concerning the financial status of the debtor and his/her household, including income, assets, liabilities or other financial burdens, and any other resources from which the debt may be recovered” as well as the name and contact information of the person’s employer.

Under the Privacy Act, whenever an agency proposes “any new use or intended use of the information,” it must disclose its plan at least 30 days in advance and provide a notice and comment period for the public to object. DOGE has done none of those things. The swarm of code bros unleashed on the executive branch, many of whom are barely old enough to buy beer, are either ignorant of or outright disdainful of federal data laws. One typical example is Thomas Shedd, the recently named director of Technology and Transformation Services, whose entire professional career appears to consist of eight years as a software engineer at Tesla. According to Wired, Shedd described privacy laws as a “roadblock” and “suggested that the federal government needs a centralized data repository, and that he was actively working with others on a strategy to create one.”

This total disregard for data privacy laws has provided the basis for establishing standing in multiple lawsuits challenging DOGE’s actions. On Monday, the Alliance for Retired Americans and two labor unions sued Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in federal court in DC “to halt Defendants’ unlawful ongoing, systematic, and continuous disclosure of personal and financial information contained in Defendants’ records to Elon Musk and other members of the so-called ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE), or to any other person.”

Citing Musk’s incessant tweets about all the fraud he’s found and the payments he’s cutting off, the plaintiffs alleged violations of the Privacy Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, and the Internal Revenue Code, which imposes an obligation to protect taxpayer information.

The cases landed on the docket of Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, an 81-year-old Clinton appointee who is sharp as a tack and takes no shit. She promptly scheduled a hearing for Wednesday afternoon and, in tacit acknowledgment of the major public importance of the case, made it accessible to the public by phone.

At the hearing, the issue revolved around both who from DOGE has access to the sensitive BFS data, and what type of access they got. Brass tacks, it’s merely terrible if these overconfident manboys get “read only” privileges, allowing them to see the data. If they have “read and write” privileges, they can start monkeying with it and bring the whole system down.

There’s been significant reporting that the DOGE bros have “read and write” access. Wired reports that a 25-year-old named Marko Elez, who came over from SpaceX and initially refused to reveal his last name, has full administrative privileges and has been vigorously poking around the back end of the system. Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall says that Elez “has already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system” and that some of it is going live now.

But in response to a letter from Senator Elizabeth Warren, Secretary Bessent insisted that no one from DOGE had the ability to rewrite code.

Currently, Treasury staff members working with Tom Krause, a Treasury employee, will have read-only access to the coded data of the Fiscal Service’s payment systems in order to continue this operational efficiency assessment. This is similar to the kind of access that Treasury provides to individuals reviewing Treasury systems, such as auditors, and that follows practices associated with protecting the integrity of the systems and business processes

This story was met with considerable skepticism, not least because just five days ago Bessent pushed out all the BFS senior staff who tried to stop DOGE from accessing its servers, including the former acting agency head, David Lebryk. Moreover Elez is being chaperoned by Tom Krause, who is not, as Bessent suggested, a regular “Treasury employee.”

Less than a week ago, Krause was the CEO of Cloud Software Group, which owns Citrix and was reportedly “helping Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.” He’s now a “special employee” of the Treasury Department, which is the same classification Trump has given to Elon Musk and to Elez as well. It’s meant for temporary employees who work fewer than 130 days in any given calendar year and are subject to some, but not all of the government’s ethics rules.

Independent financial journalist Nathan Tankus stands by his reporting that Bessent is either lying or misinformed. He quotes an inside source saying:

Treasury has been denying that they gave Marko write access, but I am looking at his access request right now and it has the Deputy Assistant Commissioner for IT Operations instructing the team to disregard all previous instructions and assign Marko read/write privileges for the database.

In court yesterday, Justice Department lawyer Bradley Humphreys represented to Judge Kollar-Kotelly that neither Krause nor Elez had the capacity to change the underlying code. And he pinky swore that they hadn’t exfiltrated the data or shared it with anyone else at DOGE, including Elon Musk. But when the judge asked Humphreys to promise that the situation would stay that way, he hedged. And so Judge Kollar-Kotelly gave the government lawyers a choice: they could warrant that things would stay status quo ante to allow for a full briefing on a motion for a preliminary injunction, or they could show up on Friday for emergency hearing on the request for a temporary restraining order.

This was functionally an offer Humphreys couldn’t refuse. From the court’s questions, it was clear that he could either agree to keep things as they are — or at least as he says they are — and take a month to argue about it, or he could bust his ass writing a brief by lunchtime tomorrow, show up Friday to argue, and then get ordered to keep things as they are. At about 9:45 last night, the government chose the path of least resistance and promised to keep Krause and Elez on “read only,” with no disclosure outside of Treasury.

And so the Republic was saved! Unless these guys were just lying, and they’re letting the baby manspreaders play Jenga with the American financial infrastructure. Guess we’ll find out soon enough if these dipshits cause a global financial meltdown trying to put the US Treasury on the blockchain!