US judges bar Musk's DOGE from Treasury, allow access to health, labor

A federal judge extended a block on Elon Musk's government cost-cutting team from accessing payment systems at the U.S. Treasury Department on Friday, while another judge allowed the billionaire's DOGE staffers to access records at health, labor and consumer financial protection agencies.

Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency has swept through federal agencies since Republican Donald Trump became president last month and put the chief executive of carmaker Tesla in charge of rooting out wasteful spending as part of Trump's dramatic overhaul of government, which included thousands of job cuts on Friday.

In Manhattan, U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas extended a temporary block on DOGE that was put in place on Saturday, which prevented Musk's team from accessing Treasury systems responsible for trillions of dollars of payments.

The judge said at a court hearing she would not yet rule on a request from 19 Democratic state attorneys general for a longer-lasting preliminary injunction on DOGE's access to the systems.