Trump Argues That Courts Cannot Block Elon Musk’s DOGE Team From Treasury Systems

Lawyers for the Trump administration argued late Sunday that a court order blocking Elon Musk’s aides from entering the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems impinged on the president’s absolute powers over the executive branch, which they said the courts could not usurp.

The administration’s arguments came in a response to a lawsuit filed Friday night by 19 state attorneys general, led by Letitia James of New York, who won a temporary pause on Saturday. The lawsuit said the Trump administration’s policy of allowing appointees and “special government employees” access to these systems, which contain sensitive information such as bank details and Social Security numbers, was unlawful.

Members of Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which is not actually a department, have been combing through the databases on what it says is a mission to find expenditures to cut. The lawsuit says that the initiative challenges the Constitution’s separation of powers, under which Congress determines government spending.

A U.S. district judge in Manhattan, Paul A. Engelmayer, in an emergency ruling early Saturday morning, ordered such officials who had been granted access to the systems since Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, to “immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.”

Judge Engelmayer said in the order that the officials’ access heightened the risk of leaks and of the systems’ vulnerability to hacking. He set a hearing in the case for Friday.

The Trump administration’s motion relies on the so-called unitary executive theory, “a somewhat controversial theory” that says the Constitution gives the president significant power over people within the executive branch, said David Zaring, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The argument is one that Mr. Trump’s administration has asserted often and “to which courts have frankly been relatively sympathetic,” he said.