DOGE Can Keep Access to Treasury Payment Systems, Court Says (2)

A group of unions lost their bid to temporarily halt the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing the Treasury Department’s payments system.

The groups “have not cleared the ‘high standard’ of showing a likelihood of an irreparable injury that is ‘beyond remediation,’” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, wrote in a Friday opinion.

The ruling comes after the US District Court for the Southern District of New York in February issued a preliminary injunction restraining DOGE’s access to the Treasury’s systems, citing the “chaotic and haphazard” launch of the Treasury’s DOGE team. But, like Kollar-Kotelly, federal judges in other districts have declined to limit DOGE’s access to Treasury’s payment records.

The Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service maintains systems that contain sensitive information about recipients of federal payments, including Social Security numbers.

BFS in January initiated a plan to support a DOGE team assigned to Treasury with identifying inefficiencies within the payment system and opportunities to advance the Trump administration’s goal of reducing waste and fraud. That work required the DOGE team to review the system’s source code and ability to view sensitive payment data.

A group of organizations—including the American Federation of Government Employees and Service Employees International Union AFL-CIO—challenged DOGE’s access to the payments system. The groups’ members receive payments from the federal government, meaning Treasury maintains their personal information.

The organizations asserted DOGE officials lack the authority to access Treasury’s payments system and view Americans’ data under the Privacy Act and Internal Revenue Code, which puts restrictions on how the federal government can collect and share data. The groups alleged that the government granting access to third parties to access their members’ private information is causing them irreparable injury and warrants a preliminary injunction, the opinion said.

Although the groups adequately alleged a concrete harm to demonstrate Article III standing, their “inability to show a likelihood of future wrongful dissemination of their members’ privacy information is fatal” to their request for a preliminary injunction, Kollar-Kotelly wrote.

Although BFS made mistakes when initially onboarding the Treasury DOGE team—including temporarily granting a DOGE worker edit permissions—the record shows the government has “taken measures to monitor and control” DOGE workers’ access to the payments systems and “limit the risk of improper disclosure outside the agency,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote. The judge added that the emotional distress the plaintiffs’ members might face due to a risk of exposure, “no matter how sincere,” isn’t a basis for a preliminary injunction in the D.C. Circuit “without a showing that the feared event giving rise to that distress is likely to occur.”

But Kollar-Kotelly left the door open for future injunctive relief, noting that if the groups could show the government planned to imminently make public the private information of their members or share it with individuals outside the federal government, the court “would not hesitate to find a likelihood of irreparable harm.”

Public Citizen Litigation Group represents the plaintiffs.

The case is Alliance for Retired Americans v. Bessent, D.D.C., No. 1:25-cv-00313, 3/7/25.