A federal judge has blocked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOG) from accessing the personal financial information of millions of Americans in Treasury Department records, according to court documents.
U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer issued a preliminary injunction on Saturday to block access, ordering Musk and his team to immediately destroy any copies of the records.
The move comes after 19 state attorneys general sued the Trump administration after Musk’s cost-cutting initiative gave DOG access to the records.
They argued that the access was for “special government employees” and that DOG, which is not a government department, violated federal law.
In a post on X, Musk called the ruling “absolutely insane.”
Democratic state attorneys general sued Trump, the Treasury Department and Treasury Secretary Scott Besant on Friday.
Engelmeyer’s order, issued early Saturday, said states would suffer “irreparable” harm without immediate remediation.
“This is both because the new policy poses a risk of exposing sensitive and confidential information and because the systems in question would be more vulnerable than ever to hacking,” the order said.
The order bars the defendants from providing certain government employees, political appointees and other employees outside the department with access to Treasury Department records containing personally identifiable or confidential information.
The ban bars them from providing access to those records to anyone other than those required to do so for their work at the Bureau of Fiscal Services and to civilian employees who have passed background checks.
The judge also ordered that any of the individuals subject to the ban immediately destroy copies of the records.
The terms will remain in place until the next court hearing on February 14.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, a member of the coalition of attorneys general that filed the lawsuit, said the Trump administration has given Musk and Doge “unprecedented access” to personal information.
“In the past week, my office has heard from more than 1,000 New Yorkers who fear that they could lose their privacy and critical funding their communities rely on due to Musk and DOGE’s interference,” she said.
Tech titan and billionaire Musk has been heavily involved in the turmoil during Trump’s second term, where Doge led major cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which distributes billions of dollars in aid worldwide.