False. It was a temporary injuction until the judge has time to review it.

> They are unelected,

So are 2.5 million other employees and advisors in government.

Do you actually have a cogent argument, or are just inherently anti-Musk and playing loosey goosey with the justification?

The dude made a Nazi salute in public in broad daylight. So yes, I'm inherently anti-Musk because I'm inherently anti-Nazi because Nazis are inherently anti human rights and anti basic freedoms.

Can you tell me a cost reduction plan involving police or military or do i have to label it law-and-order with a sharp salute for you to understand what i am talking about?

Communication is so messy man, two sides, same iterpretation ... just tell me when i can lower my arm of friendship, that absolutely noone could misunderstand.

Historically, that has not been the case, hence the question.

> Can you tell me a cost reduction plan involving police or military or do i have to label it law-and-order with a sharp salute for you to understand what i am talking about?

Just yesterday this[0] was a headline: "Hegseth wants Pentagon to cut 8% from defense budget for each of the next 5 years"

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hegseth-pentagon-8-percent-cuts...

The 2.5 million you speak of operate within agencies whose mandates have been given by Congress and their actions are subject to judicial reciew. There is no Comgressional mandate for DOGE. They are the rogue agency people like you spent years worrying about.

"The United States Digital Service is hereby publicly renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and shall be established in the Executive Office of the President."

And I’m not sure why you think a “congressional mandate” is required for the executive to do things, it’s not. Especially for an agency that a former President created on his own.

As for data access, my understanding is the digital services agency already had data access to other agencies through pre-existing agreements (it goes back to the original mandate to fix the Obamacare website which required pulling data from numerous databases).

[1]https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/esta...

I give credit to Trump and Musk for playing the DC game like professional politicians.

It’s pretty clear you can’t get anything done in DC without it.

There is. It was given during Obama. You might not like it, but it looks like DOGE is likely to be completely legal and working within the frameworks of the government.

It was in fact multiple injunctions because people at DOGE kept trying to work around it in increasingly stupid ways.

> So are 2.5 million other employees and advisors in government.

Those employees are employed by a government agency established, funded and given their mission by Congress. The heads of these agencies are approved by the US Senate.

None of these statements above apply to Elon Musk or "DOGE."

We did this to ourselves.

I think it's worth pointing out that it's not a given Congress would have approved it all. For a start, it would take longer to legally setup the instruments that Musk wanted. Also, the current situation allows Republicans to conveniently wash their hands of any negative consequences. Which is likely a big reason they're not pushing on this at all, as demanding a vote would require them to take a clear side on DOGE.

I wonder how much of your concern is driven this type of paranoid hyperbole

A judgement that was presided by a well-known anti-Trump judge whose OWN daughter worked for "Authentic Campaigns" - which took significant payments to the tune of millions of dollars from the Biden-Harris campaign - and also $16 million from Schiff ? The judge should have recused himself as applicable under "Section 100.3(E)(1) of the Rules of Judicial Conduct", but then I guess it would have been hard to find another partisan judge if he had done so.

What a joke - that conviction truly proved to the ENTIRE world that the U.S. is a corrupt BANANA republic and does not possesses the moral authority to preach about "opposition treatment" to nations of the Global South. The next time a US Secretary of State threatens sanctions while preaching high-faluting nonsense about the principles of democracy, this judgement will definitely be brought up.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/judge-denies-states-bi...

Nobody complained about "unelected" Obama or Biden appointees accessing the treasury or SSN, but now that Trump is exposing corruption en-masse and stopping the gravy train, many folks are suddenly very concerned. The FUD is unfortunately not working.

All this will probably go to the Supreme Court. And just like Biden ignored the Supreme Court ruling on student loans and even boasted about it proudly on twitter - saying they cannot block the executive, the precedent was also setup for Trump to do the same.

https://imgur.com/gallery/doge-math-wow-very-bad-much-corrup...

It's not the stupidest argument, but it applies to every last staff member of the us treasury.

None of the bureaucrats are elected, and this data has been gathered by the government to perform its functions. Insofar as Elon's team are pretty much just a couple of new bureaucrats bought in by Trump; they can use this data to streamline government. The office of president is pretty powerful; odds are he can appoint people to do work for him. It'd be crazy if he can't.

The problem is the government shouldn't be storing a whole bunch of sensitive data. It is like being shocked that someone in the NSA is actually looking at all the data they collect - there is a big problem there, but it is that they're collecting and storing the data. Obviously once they have it people will look at it. That is why it is being gathered and stored. It should be criminal to store on the grounds of privacy; but it isn't.

"On the grounds of privacy it should be criminal for the agency authorised to fund medical treatments to store people's sensitive medical records related to treatments they pay for" sounds like a much less defensible proposition than "on the grounds of privacy it should be criminal for what is nominally the government's IT advice body to hire a bunch of script kiddies without proper vetting or any genuine auditing credentials to download said sensitive medical records, store them as insecurely as they like, cross reference them with whatever other sensitive data they find on the grounds that they might be able to use them to tweet dubious claims about waste"...

We can call anyone a script kiddie. I know some people who do data analysis for government health departments. Calling them a script kiddie wouldn't be respectful but they are youthful and do run scripts. The process appointing Musk is was more public and accountable than the one appointing my friends. Musk even gets public debate on the subject of whether hiring his people is a good idea or not. They're being very well vetted.

People are weird. I feel like a lot of ink gets spilled pointing out that one day the government will be controlled by people you don't like no matter who you are. But that argument doesn't seem to get through to all these people who panic every time it turns out that democracies don't always elect the same people with the same ideologies over and over. Government isn't trustworthy and people shouldn't be discovering that en masse in February 2025.

I mean, even if it was as simple "$n recurring payments for $drug to $SSN over $period", that absolutely is sensitive private information, especially when linked to originally entirely separate but equally critical records about someone's employment by a body tasked with firing people...

It absolutely makes sense for records to be audited with great care by qualified people in an airgapped environment with anonymization by default, but that's not what's happening here, is it? It's like I'm actually pretty convinced that it's necessary for the state to be able to arrest and incarcerate people, but I'm not convinced that the "due process" bit doesn't matter or that untrained edgelords to be making the decisions on incarceration is fundamentally the same as having police, prosecution and a trial to lock people up. I don't think the answer to the fact I might not like every executive the electorate votes in (or every law that exists) is to defund police, I think the answer is to have due process, and not due process that is de facto abolished on the day a new executive assumes power. It's much the same with governments being able to store some data

> We can call anyone a script kiddie. I know some people who do data analysis for government health departments. Calling them a script kiddie wouldn't be respectful but they are youthful and do run scripts.

I think it's a pretty accurate description for a 19 year old whose short and undistinguished career history involves being fired from an internship at a cybersecurity firm for leaking its secrets to a competitor, and soliciting DDoS attacks on The Com.

Certainly better than "very well vetted".

I imagine young people you know that do data analysis for health departments have more auditing experience, fewer red flags, very carefully controlled access to data and senior people training them and checking their work. They would, I imagine, also be competent enough to be unlikely to confuse $8b and $8m when estimating cost savings...

Like tax returns? What legitimate need does management consultant have to see the individual tax returns of any person without any accountable transparency?

It gets back to this basic issue of what this data is that I don't want anyone to know but the government needs to have a permanent record of. The overlap of those two things should be tiny. If it is so terrible that Musk & team can't look at it, why is it OK to be recorded? It isn't like the security of these departments is expected to be that great; data leaks. All the data that a large organisation holds is likely to become public sooner or later even if that happens because it is sold on the darknet. And the employees that looks it it regularly are who-knows-who doing who-knows-what on a good day.

It is not illegal. You can bookmark this comment for when it finally winds its way through the courts. Whether you love or hate the idea, this is a clearly legitimate exercise of executive authority and this judge is going to get smacked down hard, and the foolish abuse of TROs is going to wind up getting their use by lower-court judges severely curtailed. Read the legal justification in the orders yourself.

Unfortunately a lot of people have lost their minds over this, and are burning through their credibility - some judges and journalists included. I don't know why, other than Musk is a moron and a polarizing figure. The Alantic breathlessly quoting government employees terrified to file their taxes because they're afraid Elon Musk will have their bank account number and routing info had my eyes rolling into the back of my head. This is fearmongering, not journalism.

I don't understand why we can't oppose this without reporting on it honestly. The problem on matters like this seems to be getting much worse over time.

> They are unelected, and have been given unprecedented access to government data.

So is everyone else in the Treasury Department.