What happened
A federal judge Thursday issued a temporary restraining order limiting access by Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” to a Treasury Department payment system that contains personal and financial information of millions of Americans.
The agreement maintained access for two DOGE officials, Tom Krause and Marko Elez, but Elez later resigned after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about a social media account that “advocated racism and eugenics.”
Who said what
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the now-deleted X account reportedly tied to Elez posted in July, according to the Journal. In September the user wrote “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity” and “Normalize Indian hate.” Elez, a 25-year old former SpaceX and X employee, and Krause gained access to the Treasury’s central government payment system last weekend, and despite White House and Treasury claims, Elez “had the ability to rewrite the code of the payment system” until Wednesday, Wired said.
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Thursday’s restraining order, based on an agreement between labor unions and the Justice Department, prohibits Elez and Krause from sharing sensitive Treasury data outside the agency and limits their access to “read only.” When DOGE moved in to Treasury, the goal was to gain full access to the system to cut off funding to USAID, The New York Times and other news organizations reported Thursday, citing emails and people familiar with the plan.
If a “DOGE technologist” like Elez was originally granted the “ability alter the code on these systems,” Wired said, it would “in theory” give him — “and, by extension, Musk, President Donald Trump or other actors — the capability to, among other things, illegally cut off congressionally authorized payments to specific individuals or entities.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow on Wednesday that “our payment system is not being touched.”
What next?
The Trump administration plans to cut USAID’s workforce from more than 10,000 employees to about 292, according to multiple news organizations.
