A federal judge has sided with the Trump administration, resolving a dispute with New York Attorney General Letitia James about the expansive scope of cost-cutters to examine U.S. Treasury payments that they claim are laden with wasteful spending.
James was among 18 Democratic attorneys general who filed suit to block an investigation by the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency into the Treasury payment system. The coterie was dealt a severe setback on Tuesday when U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas, for the Southern District of New York, lifted the last legal hurdle for the four DOGE employees tasked with carrying out the investigation.
An earlier order was also relaxed after the Trump administration showed evidence that it appropriately trained the four employees to safeguard sensitive taxpayer information during the probe. In April, Vargas granted access to one DOGE employee after they completed a similar training program.
Prior to those decisions, the judge, a Biden appointee, was mostly siding with the state prosecutors who argued that Treasury’s processes for granting access were poorly established, a likely violation of law.
The latest ruling also unfetters DOGE from having to request a court order each time the austerity agency adds new staff members to the Treasury investigation.
“[T]here is little utility in having this Court function as Treasury’s de facto human resources officer each time a new team member is onboarded,” Vargas wrote in her order, Politico reported.
“The parties are in agreement that … the New DOGE Employees should be permitted to have access to (Bureau of the Fiscal Service) payment systems,” she explained.
Treasury DOGE team leader Tom Krause and DOGE members Linda Whitridge, Samuel Corcos, and Todd Newman joined together to submit dozens of pages of documents explaining the rigorous training procedures that employees would be required to complete before accessing the Treasury data.
James, who is currently under criminal investigation, previously called the DOGE investigation an “illegal power grab” by the Trump administration and defended the suit as necessary to protect the integrity of Social Security, Medicaid, and other federal safety net programs.
Members of DOGE have previously sought to access the Treasury portal, known as the Bureau of the Fiscal Service or BFS, in order to end payments to USAID and other agencies that continued to operate despite efforts to dismantle them. The action kicked off a flurry of legal activity exploring whether the executive branch has the power to terminate transfers to agencies that have been allocated by Congress.
The BFS funnels more than $5 trillion in federal spending per year, touching everything from remote arms of the bureaucracy to the greased gears of larger health and defense department agencies. It has historically been off-limits to presidential appointees, a restriction DOGE founder Elon Musk sought to overturn after launching the agency.
