A federal judge on Tuesday declined to block Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing government data or firing federal employees.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan declined to grant the plaintiffs’ request to issue a temporary restraining order, citing what she said was their failure to demonstrate evidence of “irreparable harm” caused by DOGE’s access.
“Plaintiffs legitimately call into question what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight,” Chutkan, an Obama appointee, said Tuesday.
“In these circumstances, it must be indisputable that this court acts within the bounds of its authority. Accordingly, it cannot issue a TRO, especially one as wide-ranging as Plaintiffs request, without clear evidence of imminent, irreparable harm to these Plaintiffs. The current record does not meet that standard.”
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People rally against the policies of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Wednesday, Feb. 12. (AP/Jose Luis Magana)
The decision from Chutkan is a blow to the coalition of 14 Democratic state attorneys general who sued last week to temporarily restrict DOGE’s access to federal data about government employees.
Plaintiffs argued that the leadership role held by Musk, a private citizen, represents an “unlawful delegation of executive power” and threatened what they described as “widespread disruption” to employees working across various federal agencies and government contractors.
“There is no greater threat to democracy than the accumulation of state power in the hands of a single, unelected individual,” said the lawsuit, filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez.
Attorneys general from Arizona, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington also joined him in the request.
While Judge Chutkan at times appeared sympathetic to the views brought by Torrez and other plaintiffs during Monday’s hearing, she also suggested she was not convinced that plaintiffs had adequately satisfied the high legal standard of “imminent harm” required for a temporary restraining order.
“The things I’m hearing are troubling indeed, but I have to have a record and findings of fact before I issue something,” Chutkan said Monday.
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Elon Musk carries his son X Æ A-Xii on his shoulders while speaking in the Oval Office of the White House on Feb. 11, 2025. (Jim WatsonAFP via Getty Images)
The hearing is the latest in a growing flurry of emergency lawsuits filed across the country seeking to block or restrict DOGE’s access to sensitive government data.
Similar legal challenges are playing out in federal courts across the country, from New York and Maryland to Virginia and D.C., with plaintiffs citing fears of privacy breaches, layoffs and possible retaliation from DOGE.
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DOGE, the Musk-led agency, was created via executive order earlier this year. Its status as a temporary organization within the White House gives DOGE and its employees just 18 months to carry out its goals of optimizing the federal government, streamlining its operations, and, of course, doing it all at a lower cost.
DOGE’s wide-ranging mission, combined with its lack of specifics, have sparked fresh concerns from outside observers, who have questioned how, exactly, the group plans to deliver on its ambitious optimization goals in such a short amount of time.
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler speaks at a rally against the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) outside the Department of Labor in Washington, D.C. (Kena Betancur/VIEWpress)
But Musk and his allies have wasted little time racing to do just that. They’ve spent the past month racing to deliver on what they see as one of President Donald Trump’s biggest campaign trail pledges: reducing bloated federal budgets, aggressively slashing government waste, and firing or putting on ice large swaths of federal employees.
The Justice Department, for its part, argued on Monday that the DOGE personnel in question are “detailed” U.S. government employees who are entitled to access the government data under provisions of the Economy Act.
Recent court victories have also buoyed DOGE’s operations – allowing them, at least for now, to continue carrying out their sprawling operation.,
As Chutkan noted Monday, fears and speculation alone are not enough to curtail DOGE access: plaintiffs must prove clearly, and with evidence, that their workings have met the hard-to-satisfy test of permanent or “irreparable” harm.
Late last week, U.S. District Judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee, also rejected a request to block DOGE from accessing records of three government agencies, writing in his own opinion Friday that plaintiffs “have not shown a substantial likelihood that [DOGE] is not an agency.”
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Elon Musk and President Donald Trump talk about DOGE’s efforts to investigate wasteful government spending from the Oval Office on Feb. 11, 2025. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
For plaintiffs, the TRO defeats have made it increasingly unclear what, if any, hope they might have to secure near-term injunctive relief.
Plaintiffs representing the 14 Democratic states argued Monday that DOGE’s broad agency access violates the appointments clause of the U.S. Constitution.
That clause requires Cabinet and other high-level leaders in the U.S. government to be nominated by a president and confirmed by a Senate majority vote – a lengthy process designed to help vet an individual’s fitness to perform in the role to which they were appointed.
They argued that the “expansive authority” granted to DOGE is not “merely academic.”
Already, plaintiffs said, Musk has “cut billions of dollars from agency budgets, fired agency personnel, and that he has moved to, in his words, ‘delete’ entire agencies.”
Trump “does not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally dismantle the government,” the attorneys general said. “Nor could he delegate such expansive authority to an unelected, unconfirmed individual.”
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And while Chutkan appeared to share in plaintiffs’ assertion that at least some of DOGE’s actions appear to be “serious and troubling,” she maintained that a deliberate fear is not enough to grant the request to block their access immediately.
“You’re talking about a generalized fear,” she said of their DOGE complaints. “I’m not seeing it so far.”
