(Reuters) - A federal judge early Saturday temporarily blocked billionaire Elon Musk's government efficiency team from accessing government systems used to process trillions of dollars in payments, citing a risk that sensitive information could be improperly disclosed.
U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer in Manhattan issued the order after a coalition of Democratic attorneys general from 19 U.S. states filed a lawsuit late Friday arguing Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has no legal power to access the U.S. Department of Treasury systems.
🚩 Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway Are in Full Panic Mode Now Calling for the Arrest of the @DOGE Engineers
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) February 8, 2025
“I want to see Democratic governors … use the full faith and the letter of the law to put you folks in prison … This is a coup … We need to go gangster here.” pic.twitter.com/RT5qiBRbFR
The ruling also applied to other political appointees of President Donald Trump's administration.
Hours after it was issued, Musk called it "absolutely insane!" in a post on his social media platform X. The billionaire said the Treasury Department and DOGE had agreed to require all outgoing government payments to include a rationale in the form of a comment and to have a categorization code.
Musk also said that a do-not-pay list of entities that should not receive government payments should be updated at least weekly, if not daily.
The changes, Musk said on X, were "obvious and necessary" and being implemented by government employees, and not by anyone from DOGE.
The lawsuit said Musk and his team could disrupt federal funding for health clinics, preschools, climate initiatives, and other programs, and that Trump could use the information to further his political agenda.
DOGE's access to the system also "poses huge cybersecurity risks that put vast amounts of funding for the States and their residents in peril," the state attorneys general said. They sought a temporary restraining order blocking DOGE's access.
The judge, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama, said the state's claims were "particularly strong" and warranted him acting on their request for emergency relief pending a further hearing before another judge on February 14.
[1/2]Demonstrators rally outside the Treasury Department, Washington, D.C., February 4, 2025. REUTERS/Kent Nishimura Purchase Licensing Rights
"That is both because of the risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking," Engelmayer wrote.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat whose office is leading the case, welcomed the ruling, saying nobody was above the law and that Americans across the country had been horrified by the DOGE team's unfettered access to their data.
"We knew the Trump administration's choice to give this access to unauthorized individuals was illegal, and this morning, a federal court agreed," James said in a statement.
"Now, Americans can trust that Musk – the world's richest man – and his friends will not have free rein over their personal information while our lawsuit proceeds."
Engelmayer's order bars access from being granted to Treasury Department payment and data systems by political appointees, special government employees, and government employees detailed from an agency outside the Treasury Department.
The judge also directed that anyone prohibited under his order from accessing those systems to immediately destroy anything they copied or downloaded.
The White House and Treasury Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Trump deputized Musk to lead DOGE to identify fraud and waste in the government. Musk's efforts have alarmed Democrats and advocacy groups who say he is overstepping his authority by seeking to dismantle agencies responsible for critical government programs and fire federal workers en masse.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a Trump appointee, said this week that the department's payment system will not be touched by Musk and that any decisions to stop payments would be made by other agencies.
In Ghana and Kenya, insecticide and mosquito nets sit in warehouses because U.S. officials haven’t approved urgent anti-malaria campaigns.
In Haiti, a group treating HIV patients awaits U.S. permission to dispense medicines that prevent mothers from giving the disease to their children.
In Myanmar, where famine looms and the U.S. is the single largest aid donor, one humanitarian worker described the situation as “mayhem.”
Nearly three weeks into U.S. President Donald Trump's sweeping freeze on foreign aid, life-saving programs across the globe remain shut as humanitarian workers struggle to secure U.S. government waivers meant to keep them open, dozens of aid workers and U.N. staff told Reuters.
After Trump announced the 90-day freeze on January 20, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued waivers for what he called “life-saving humanitarian assistance,” which included “core life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance.”
But aid workers and U.N. officials said the waivers had sparked widespread confusion, along with fears that their U.S. funding would never be restored.
They said they couldn’t restart work without first confirming with their U.S. counterparts whether specific programs qualified for exemption. This was proving nearly impossible, they said, due to a communication breakdown with U.S. officials, some of whom had been fired or barred from talking.
The breakdown appeared partly by design. On January 31, staff at the United States Agency for International Development, once the main delivery mechanism for American largesse, were told not to communicate externally about the waiver and what it may or may not include, according to a previously unreported recording of the meeting reviewed by Reuters.
The U.S. State Department and White House did not respond to requests for comment.
The spiraling consequences of the aid freeze in developing countries underline the real-world harms from Trump's upending of decades-old U.S. initiatives designed to build global alliances by making America the world’s most generous superpower and largest single aid donor.
Aid workers had a list of urgent questions going unanswered. Among them: Which programs could continue? What qualifies as a life-saving aid? Food? Shelter? Medicine? And how do they keep people from dying when almost every aid service has been shut at once?
With little guidance from U.S. officials, aid workers said their organizations erred on the side of caution and closed programs rather than incur expenses that the U.S. government might not reimburse, the aid workers said. Some described how U.S partners – often people they had worked with for years – no longer answered their phones or emails.
One Geneva-based aid official who reached U.S. officials was stunned by their response. “We asked: Can you tell us exactly which programs we need to stop? Then we got a message saying ‘no more guidance is forthcoming’. This leaves us in a situation where you have to make a choice of which program is ‘life-saving’,” the official said. “We don’t have money to pay for it ourselves. We can’t spend money we don’t know if we have.”
The turmoil was particularly acute at USAID, now in disarray and targeted for closure as a “criminal organization” by Trump’s government efficiency tsar, the billionaire Elon Musk.
In his executive order, Trump said the U.S. “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy” were “in many cases antithetical to American values.” He ordered the 90-day pause pending a review on whether aid was consistent with his “America First” foreign policy.
Most of those who spoke to Reuters requested anonymity, fearful of antagonizing the Trump administration and jeopardizing the possible restoration of aid.
Two workers with aid organizations in Myanmar told Reuters they didn’t know whether U.S.-funded food distribution in the country was covered by a waiver and would continue. One of the workers described the situation as “mayhem.” Myanmar faces a severe food crisis due to natural disasters and a spiraling civil war. An estimated two million people in the country are on the brink of famine, according to the U.N.
Refugees also bore the brunt of the aid freeze in Bangladesh, where the U.S. funds about 55% of assistance to more than a million Rohingya from Myanmar living in squalid camps. "Some essential and life-saving services” had been interrupted by the freeze, said the Inter Sector Coordination Group, an international relief organization that oversees the camps, in a previously unreported draft statement to local aid groups. The group didn’t respond to a request for comment.
A U.N. official in Bangladesh seeking clarity on which programs could remain open said U.S. counterparts were “not answering the phones.”
In Africa, humanitarian workers were due to start anti-malaria spraying campaigns this month in Ghana and Kenya before mosquito populations explode during the rainy season, but insecticide and mosquito nets are stuck in warehouses, said a USAID contractor.
A USAID memo, dated February 4 and seen by Reuters on Saturday, said “life-saving activities” to address malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases and conditions would be exempt from the freeze. But campaigns to protect millions of people appeared on hold as aid workers sought clarification on when funding would resume and specific malaria programs in Africa could restart, the contractor said.
Malaria, a preventable disease, is caused by parasites transmitted to people by the bites of infected mosquitoes. The vast majority of the world’s 597,000 malaria deaths in 2023 were African children aged under five years old, the World Health Organization said in December.
“There is a small window to do those campaigns which is going to close rapidly,” said the USAID contractor.
Millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars already spent on supplies to fight malaria in Africa could go to waste, aid workers said. Malaria No More, a global nonprofit based in Washington, said the freeze could prevent the distribution of 15.6 million life-saving treatments, nine million nets and 48 million doses of preventative medicine.
The U.S. is the top donor in the global fight against malaria, mostly through the President's Malaria Initiative, known as PMI, set up under former President George W. Bush in 2005. PMI’s website – which included information on populations at risk of malaria – has been taken down and replaced with a brief statement: “To be consistent with the President's Executive Orders, this website is currently undergoing maintenance as we expeditiously and thoroughly review all of the content.”
“It’s as if all the work . . . has just been erased,” said Anne Linn, a USAID staffer who worked remotely from Montana as a technical advisor and was fired on Jan. 28. “It’s so cruel and senseless,” she said. “The wastefulness of it is staggering to me.”
In Haiti, a program that provides treatment to AIDS patients was supposed to be exempt from the aid freeze under a State Department waiver but remained shut because it hadn’t received specific written instructions to open, said a worker at the nonprofit program. She said funding for the program came from the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, the world's leading initiative to combat HIV.
The State Department, which manages PEPFAR, said on February 1 that the program was covered by the waiver for life-saving humanitarian assistance. However, the aid worker said she hadn’t received paperwork confirming that they could continue to distribute medicine.
"Everything is closed until further notice," she said. Pregnant women were at risk because the program provides medication that can prevent HIV transmission to their infants, she added. She said more than half of Haiti’s 150,000 AIDS patients received treatment through PEPFAR.
In 2024, the U.S. provided 60% of Haiti’s humanitarian funding, totaling $208 million, according to the U.N.’s Financial Tracking Service.
TURMOIL AT USAID
The problems were exacerbated by turmoil at USAID, whose leaders Trump has described as “radical left lunatics.”
Trump's administration plans to keep 611 staff at USAID out of its worldwide total of more than 10,000, according to a notice sent to the agency on February 5 and reviewed by Reuters.
Washington's primary humanitarian aid agency has been a target of a government reorganization program spearheaded by Musk, a close Trump ally, since the Republican president took office on January 20. Staff have been shut out of the agency’s headquarters in Washington. Rubio has appointed himself the agency’s acting administrator.
An expert in water and sanitation spoke of “mass confusion” at the USAID’s global health bureau after she and dozens of others were fired on January 28. “It happened so quickly that I had no way of saving emails, contacts,” she said. “We were all just thrown away and bulldozed over.”
‘PEOPLE ARE GOING TO DIE’
In Thailand, the aid freeze forced the International Rescue Committee, which funds health clinics with U.S. support, to quickly shut down the hospital and clinics it ran in seven refugee camps on the Myanmar-Thai border. IRC was told by U.S. officials they couldn’t reopen before receiving another notification, which hasn’t arrived, said an aid worker.
Many were discharged from the IRC facilities, leaving people including pregnant women and children unable to access medication or medical equipment, said Francois Nosten, director of the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit, a field station in the border camps run by Bangkok's Mahidol University.
An elderly woman, who had been hospitalized with lung problems and was dependent on oxygen, died four days after being discharged, according to her family. Reuters couldn’t independently confirm her cause of death.
An IRC spokesperson said some refugees had "self-organized" to provide critical services for themselves until aid support was "transitioned" to Thai authorities.
If “you cut all the activities then some people are going to die,” said Nosten.
A handful of demonstrators gathered outside Trump International Golf Club on Saturday to protest President Donald Trump's immigration policies while the commander-in-chief spent leisure time at the club.
Carrying signs and Mexican, Guatemalan, and U.S. flags and chanting "Immigrants Make America Great," the small group of people shouted loudly and was visible as Trump, who spent several hours at the club, exited in his motorcade and drove by on Saturday afternoon.
Their chant was a reference to the president's "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan.
One sign in Spanish said, "The American Dream is also ours."
Trump, a Republican who has been in office just shy of three weeks, won the presidency in large part on the back of a promise to crack down on illegal immigration.
He has implemented that promise with speed, starting on the day he was inaugurated, by tasking the U.S. military to help with border security, issuing a broad ban on asylum, and seeking to restrict citizenship for children born on U.S. soil.
Protesters and supporters frequently gather outside venues where Trump is staying to show their disdain or their enthusiasm for his policies.
The Trump administration's abrupt move to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has upended the lives of thousands of American employees and family members posted overseas, leaving them facing costly and difficult decisions, agency personnel said on Friday.
A U.S. judge on Friday said he would enter a "very limited" temporary order blocking the Trump administration's changes to the agency, but the fate of its staff remained uncertain.
The employees affected by Trump's actions include pregnant women whose plans to fly back to the United States to deliver their babies have been disrupted and families who will return home without housing or schooling for their children, they said.
"We literally have focused our life on this USAID mission, and we do not have a home to go back to," said the spouse of a Latin America-based employee. "We don't know how we're supposed to pick up and just leave."
She joined several agency personnel who spoke during an online briefing arranged by StandUpForAID, a group of current and former officials formed to raise awareness of the impacts of Trump's cuts to the agency.
All requested anonymity out of fear of retribution for speaking out.
U.S. President Donald Trump froze U.S. foreign assistance after taking office on January 20, stalling billions of dollars in food, health, and other programs. The spending freeze is supposed to last 90 days pending a review of efficiencies and consistency with Trump's foreign policy.
USAID, the chief U.S. humanitarian agency and an employer of more than 10,000 people - including more than 1,900 Americans posted abroad - became the first target of the effort led by billionaire Elon Musk to reduce the size of the U.S. government.
The U.S. Department of State did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
More than one dozen pregnant agency employees and spouses planning to fly home for their deliveries at USAID expense are stranded overseas, said a USAID employee.
"We are unsure if Secretary (of State Marco) Rubio and President Trump are going to abandon us overseas or when we land on American soil," she said. "We have been told there is no money to assist U.S. families who are awaiting the arrival of our infants with resettlement in the United States."
She said that the terms of her husband's employment called for them to be provided housing for 60 days on their return under an evacuation order or another form of rapid repatriation.
"Our employer, the United States government, is not honoring its duty of care," she said.
Another pregnant USAID official placed on administrative leave on Friday told Reuters in an interview that she had to scramble to change her delivery location to ensure her State Department-arranged medical evacuation.
The State Department could not guarantee that her medical costs would be covered beyond March 9, the deadline set for the repatriation of all USAID workers overseas, she said, leaving her in deep financial uncertainty.
Reuters could not confirm the exact number of pregnant agency employees and spouses. In a meeting on Wednesday with staff at the U.S. embassy in Guatemala City, Rubio, now the acting USAID administrator, acknowledged there were several "members of (US)AID that are in their third trimester of a pregnancy," and that the recalling of staff might have been disruptive, according to a partial transcript of the remarks reviewed by Reuters.
The administration will keep 611 essential USAID workers, according to a notice sent by the agency late on Thursday night and shared with Reuters by an administration official on Friday.
More than two-thirds of USAID's personnel work overseas, and originally were told they would have to pack up and fly home by Friday. That directive was replaced by another setting the March 9 deadline.