A coalition of 19 Democratic-led states sued the Trump administration Friday night over the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)’s access to Treasury Department payment systems that dole out trillions of dollars in payments annually.
The lawsuit, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James and announced earlier in the week, is the latest legal resistance against billionaire Elon Musk’s sweeping moves to reshape and dismantle parts of the federal bureaucracy.
“As the richest man in the world, Elon Musk is not used to being told ‘no,’ but in our country, no one is above the law,” James said in a statement.
The states that sued alongside New York are Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
In a separate lawsuit, the Justice Department earlier this week agreed to temporarily limit DOGE’s access to Treasury Department systems.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., let two special government employees with ties to DOGE maintain “read-only” access to the systems while litigation continues — but one of those two employees tendered his resignation after several racist social media posts were exposed by the Wall Street Journal.
An account associated with the employee, 25-year-old Marko Elez, posted to “Normalize Indian hate” and that “you could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity,” according to the Journal.
But later Friday, after launching a poll on X, Musk said he would rehire the staffer. The attorneys general mentioned the posts in their complaint.
In statements announcing the lawsuit, the attorneys generals took sharp aim at DOGE and its leadership as the group implants itself in the executive branch, agency by agency.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes called DOGE’s access to the Treasury systems a “coup, plain and simple,” deriding Musk as an “unelected weirdo billionaire” and his team as a “group of teenage hackers.”
Aaron Ford, Nevada’s attorney general, said Trump has the right to “lawfully” enact his policies but claimed the Treasury access was “illegally provided” to Musk and DOGE.
And Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul accused Trump of putting “the whims of Elon Musk” ahead of Americans’ privacy and security.
“We’ve gone to court to address this outrageous situation and to protect the American people,” Kaul said.
Earlier in the week, the Justice Department in a separate lawsuit agreed to temporarily limit DOGE’s access to Treasury Department systems, which dole out trillions of dollars of payments annually, until the next stage of the case.
The lawsuit is just one emerging battle over Musk’s plans to slash trillions of dollars in federal spending, which has led his team to seize access to agencies across the government.
Legal efforts have also been waged against the DOGE team’s efforts in the Education and Labor departments. One group of plaintiffs has vowed to expand their lawsuit over the weekend to cover the Department of Health and Human Services and the Consumer Protection Financial Protection Bureau.
