This week, President Trump adviser Elon Musk’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seems to have gained full access to the Department of Treasury’s payments system responsible for processing trillions of dollars of spending, and containing sensitive personal data about hundreds of millions of Americans including bank accounts, tax data, Social Security numbers, tax refunds, Medicare benefits, and home address.
If this concerns you, you’re not alone. Judging from social media, many Americans are overwhelmed with the sheer volume of changes coming from the Trump administration, and are worried about what is happening with our federal government.
In short, “people are creeped out,” according to Senator Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, who along with Senator Elizabeth Warren called on the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent’s decision to grant Musk and DOGE access to sensitive government payment systems.
“It is difficult to know all the things that Elon Musk is doing inside the Treasury Department because of a lack of transparency,” Barbara McQuade, who served as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan under President Barack Obama, told Fast Company.
Now, DOGE, whose staff has largely operated in secret, communicating through encrypted messages on Signal, according to the Wall Street Journal, is starting to rack up legal challenges.
On Monday, a coalition of labor unions and the Alliance for Retired Americans filed a lawsuit suing the Treasury Department, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service to halt the “unlawful ongoing, systematic, and continuous disclosure of personal and financial information” to Elon Musk and other members of DOGE, or to any other person. The lawsuit alleges all three defendants illegally allowed the coalition’s members’ records to be shared with Musk’s DOGE.
The Alliance for Retired Americans and the labor unions, which include the American Federation of Government Employees and the Service Employees International Union, are represented by lawyers from Public Citizen Litigation Group and State Democracy Defenders Fund.
What is DOGE and what kind of authority does it have?
Trump created DOGE through an executive order on his first day in office, creating a temporary government organization with a mandate to “moderniz[e] Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”
But there are many questions about who actually works for DOGE, if the agency is hiring existing government employees or employees from Musk’s various companies, and if DOGE staff are overstepping their legal authority. (Wired recently reported a 25-year-old engineer at DOGE now has administrative privileges over the code that controls Social Security payments, tax returns, and more.)
DOGE was originally a joint project that Musk would run with Vivek Ramaswamy (who ran against Trump in the Republican presidential primary before endorsing him), along with Bill McGinley, who was named DOGE’s legal counsel. Both Ramaswamy and McGinley have since left, which some have suggested could signal infighting and perhaps a disagreement over how DOGE would function among the group.
Musk, meanwhile, was recently classified as a “special government employee,” which basically allows him to work at the White House for some 130 days before he’s required to file the necessary financial disclosure forms required of White House employees. This is concerning for a number of reasons, as he hasn’t been properly vetted yet, and because as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, which both rely on government contracts, Musk potentially has a number of conflicts of interest.
