A coalition of labor organizations representing federal workers and retirees has sued the Department of the Treasury to block it from giving the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, controlled by Elon Musk, access to the federal government’s sensitive payment systems.
After forcing out a security official who opposed the move, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent granted DOGE workers access to the system last week, according to The New York Times. Despite its name, DOGE is not a government department but rather an ad-hoc group formed by President Trump purportedly tasked with cutting government spending.
The labor organizations behind the lawsuit filed Monday argue that Bessent broke federal privacy and tax confidentiality laws by giving unauthorized DOGE workers, including people like Musk who are not government employees, the ability to view the private information of anyone who pays taxes or receives money from federal agencies.
With access to the Treasury systems, DOGE representatives can potentially view the names, social security numbers, birth dates, mailing addresses, email addresses, and bank information of tens of millions of people who receive tax refunds, social security and disability payments, veterans benefits, or salaries from the federal government, according to the lawsuit.
“The scale of the intrusion into individuals’ privacy is massive and unprecedented,” according to the complaint filed by the Alliance for Retired Americans, the American Federation of Government Employees, and the Service Employees International Union.
Several Republican members of Congress told Politico on Monday that Bessent assured them during a closed-door meeting that Musk and DOGE did not, in fact, have control over the payment systems. However, other members of Congress and multiple news outlets have reported that DOGE representatives have, at a minimum, the ability to view data from the systems. And Musk himself has boasted on X that DOGE was “rapidly shutting down these illegal payments” to Lutheran organizations that receive federal money to provide social services in their communities.
In their lawsuit, the labor organizations argue that federal law prohibits the disclosure of taxpayer information to anyone except Treasury employees who require it for their official duties unless the disclosure is authorized by a specific law, which DOGE’s access to the system is not. DOGE’s access also violates the Privacy Act of 1974, which prohibits disclosure of personal information to unauthorized people and lays out strict procedures for changing those authorizations, which the Trump administration has not followed, according to the suit.
The plaintiffs have asked the Washington, D.C. district court to grant an injunction preventing unauthorized people from accessing the payment systems and to rule the Treasury’s actions unlawful.