The news from today relates to the negotiated restraining order a judge approved arising from the Alliance for Retired Americans v. Scott Bessett litigation. Per that order, access to the Treasury Department’s data has now been limited to just two DOGErs, Tom Krause and Marko Elez, and that that access is “read only”:
The Defendants will not provide access to any payment record or payment system of records maintained by or within the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, except that the Defendants may provide access to any of the following people:
o Mr. Tom Krause, a Special Government Employee in the Department of the Treasury, as needed for the performance of his duties, provided that such access to payment records will be “read only”;
o Mr. Marko Elez, a Special Government Employee in the Department of the Treasury, as needed for the performance of his duties, provided that such access to payment records will be “read only”;
This order comes after reporting from earlier this week that, despite promises from the Treasury Department that Krause had “read only” access, Elez appeared to have admin privileges and may have even pushed live code into the system.
It is also not clear that it goes beyond payment records. Per the order access is limited to “any payment records,” which presumably includes Americans personal information. And access is also limited to “any payment system of records.” But “payment system of records” is a term desperate for definition, because it’s not at all clear that it applies to what it really needs to apply to.
What is really dangerous is for these renegades to have access to the software code that makes the payments out of Treasury. But this provision looks like it only prevents them from accessing the system that handles how Treasury handles the records about whom to pay. It does not look like this injunctive provision extends to anything that controls the payments themselves. It looks like any number of DOGErs (beyond just Krause and Elez) could still have access to those systems and the software Treasury uses to make payments (even if they don’t have direct access to the records of payments). There appears to be nothing in this order to limit any DOGEr’s access to not just see the software code but potentially also change the code, upload the code, and run the code.
If anything, the negotiated settlement suggests that DOGE very much still intends to do such things, given that Krause and (previously) Elez still needed access to records “for the performance of [their] duties.” What duties are these? How do they relate to actual payments? What are they still doing in these systems?
This lawsuit of course may not have been the right vehicle to limit their access to the software code, given that it was brought to address the separate problem of the the privacy harm resulting when any of them can see Americans’ personal information.
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