Trump DOJ calls judge's DOGE order 'anti-constitutional'
President Donald Trump's Justice Department pushed to undo an "anti-Constitutional" ruling from a federal judge that blocked Elon Musk and any of his close associates from accessing Treasury Department data on Monday.
U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer's Saturday ruling blocked Department of Government Efficiency officials from accessing personal data such as social security numbers and bank account numbers. While the Trump administration says it has "substantially complied" with the order, the DOJ has attacked the order as "anti-constitutional."
The White House noted that the Senate-confirmed Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, is also prohibited from accessing the data under the order.
Vice President JD Vance argued that ruling was unconstitutional on X, saying it was an example of judicial overreach.
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"If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power," Vance wrote Sunday.
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Other White House officials echoed Vance's statement over the weekend, arguing the judge was blocking DOGE's legitimate efforts to purge government waste.
"What we continue to see here is the idea that rogue bureaucrats who are elected by no one, who answer to no one, who have lifetime tenure jobs, who we would be told can never be fired, which, of course, is not true, that the power has been cemented and accumulated for years, whether it be with the Treasury bureaucrats or the FBI bureaucrats or the CIA bureaucrats or the USAID bureaucrats, with this unelected shadow force that is running our government and running our country," Deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller said on "Sunday Morning Futures."
Musk himself condemned Engelmayer as a "corrupt judge protecting corruption" and called for him to be impeached.
Trump weighed in on the issue later Sunday on his way to the Superbowl in New Orleans, telling reporters that he is "very disappointed" in the ruling, but adding that "we have a long way to go.
"No judge should frankly be allowed to make that kind of a decision," he said.
New York Attorney General Letitia James' lawsuit claims Musk's DOGE is seeking access to the data to "illegally block" payments to "essential programs."