A judge on Friday will start an investigation into security over the US Treasury’s payment system as a government watchdog prepares to determine whether Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” ( Doge ) had unconstitutional access to the highly sensitive data base.
Amid mounting court cases concerning Doge’s activities, the government agency’s inspector general said it would start an audit after Democrats complained about the accessibility gained to a 25-year-old Musk associate, Marko Elez, who was briefly granted edit access within the system, meaning he had the potential to change entries. An interval court’s decision later reversed the exposure.
Millions of dollars in private information are stored in the payment method, which also distributes trillions of dollars to federal government programs.
Trump has asked billionaire Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk to cut government spending by focusing on admitted waste and fraud. He has also upended significant sections of the federal bureaucracy, cancelling contracts, halting spending initiatives, and displacing thousands of staff members.
Loren Sciurba, the government’s assistant inspector general, may review the past two years of the system’s transactions to verify Musk’s claim that his team has uncovered evidence of billions of dollars of false payments.
She claimed that the assessment, which was initiated in response to demands from Democratic senators Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren, may take place until August.
A prosecutor in Washington was considering a legal suit brought by Democrat attorneys general from 14 states, alleging Doge’s labor was unlawful on the grounds that Trump allegedly violated the US law by creating a federal government office without the approval of the court.
The attorneys general contend that Musk has “virtually unchallenged power” by granting government agencies broad cuts without the consent or oversight of Congress.
Despite a judge’s order on Thursday to partially lift the funding freeze that the government has placed on the organization’s charitable work, USAid, the government’s foreign assistance agency, has been shuttered under his leadership and its employees have been placed on leave.
The suit, led by New Mexico’s justice ministry, alleges that Doge has “unraveled governmental agencies, accessed sensitive data, and caused widespread disruption for state and local governments, national staff, and the British people”.
The attorneys general requested that Musk be required to disclose how “any data obtained through unlawful agency access was used” and to erasure any “unauthorised access in his or Doge’s possession.” They requested a hearing in the court to stop Musk and his team from halting the flow of public funds, roiling contracts, and dismantling institutions.
After Musk claimed that the US needed to “delete entire agencies” to eliminate waste, the hearing was scheduled to take place.
A separate hearing in a court in New York was scheduled for this afternoon regarding whether to extend a temporary ban on the Doge team’s entry into the payments system that Judge Paul Englemayer imposed in an interim ruling last Saturday. Musk called for Englemayer’s impeachment after that ruling, while JD Vance, the vice-president, wrote in a social media most that judges were not allowed to interfere with a president’s “legitimate power” – a view contested by most constitutional law experts.
Despite the numerous legal challenges, swinging cuts continued apace. According to the Washington Post, federal agency heads were given the ultimatum to fire the majority of recent hires who had not completed their probation, a move likely to affect about 200, 000 workers.
The treasury department audit coincided with a call from Chris Murphy, Democratic senator for Connecticut, for an official investigation into the “legality and scope” of Musk’s penetration of the federal bureaucracy.
According to Murphy, the US government comptroller general, Eugene Dodaro,” Musk and his aides are subject to various conflict of interest laws that prohibit federal employees from engaging in activities that adversely affect their own financial interests.”
He continued,” It is crucial that the public understands whether Musk and his aides have complied with the law and whether highly sensitive data could be in danger if it is accessed by private actors who seek to profit from the information illegally, or worse, by foreign adversaries who wish to attack this country.”
The US armed services were preparing a list of weapons systems to be cut in advance of Doge casting its gaze over the Pentagon, according to the Wall Street Journal, despite the growing resistance to its activities.
On Friday, Musk’s team members were scheduled to travel to the Pentagon. ” People are offering up things sacrificially, hoping that will prevent more cuts”, a defence official told the Journal.
The army was said to be willing to donate outdated drones and other equipment, while the navy is proposing cuts to frigates and littoral combat ships.