DENVER — Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser along with more than a dozen other state attorneys general said Friday they're suing over the federal government’s swift cost-cutting measures granting Elon Musk staffers access to sensitive payment systems.
The billionaire adviser to President Donald Trump — who is spearheading a task force known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — last week gained access to sensitive U.S. Department of Treasury data including Social Security and Medicare customer payment systems.
The move is part of a series of initiatives by the task force to “expose wasteful spending, protect taxpayers, and improve the efficiency of the federal government."
The latest action by DOGE, created by Trump via an executive order, “is unlawful, unprecedented, and unacceptable,” Weiser said in a statement Thursday. “The President does not have the power to give away our private information to anyone he chooses, and he cannot cut federal payments approved by Congress.”
Weiser, in tandem with attorneys general from Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin, argued DOGE “has no authority to access this information, which they explicitly sought in order to block critical payments that millions of Americans rely on – payments that support health care, childcare, and other essential programs.”
“In defense of our Constitution, our right to privacy, and the essential funding that individuals and communities nationwide are counting on, we will be filing a lawsuit to stop this injustice,” Weiser said.
Denver7 spoke with Steve Beaty, a professor of computer science at Metropolitan State University Denver, who wants to know why DOGE wants this information.
“So, they're claiming that the data that they are gathering helps with government efficiency. Has anybody shown that that is the case? Has anybody said that we now have 340 million records on all of the people in the United States, and this is going to save us millions, billions, trillions of dollars? No," Beaty said. "How is this helping us as a country save money?”
The White House did not immediately respond to news of the lawsuit.
This is the second time in as many weeks that Weiser and other state attorneys general have challenged the Trump administration over their proposed reforms to the federal government.
Last month, Weiser and three of his counterparts announced they would be suing to block Trump from moving forward with an executive order that would have frozen federal funding. That plan was temporarily blocked by a federal judge at the 11th hour.
The latest legal battle between state officials and the Trump administration is happening alongside at least one lawsuit that has been filed by a group of labor unions and advocates who are seeking to stop the Treasury Department from giving DOGE and Musk access to the payment systems, according to The Associated Press.
Access to the Treasury’s payment systems came after the agency’s acting Deputy Secretary, David Lebryk, resigned from his position of more than 30 years after Musk and DOGE requested access to sensitive Treasury data.
A Treasury Department official said Tuesday that a tech executive working with DOGE will have “read-only access” to the government’s payment system, meaning the information cannot be changed or modified once programmed into a computer, the AP reported.
Editor's note on Feb. 7, 2025: This story has been edited to reflect that state attorneys general in Colorado and elsewhere have sued the Trump administration and reflects the latest number of states who have joined the lawsuit.
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