He doesn’t want DOGE on a short leash.
Space and electric car magnate Elon Musk has suggested that judges who have thrown up roadblocks to his Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) crusade to trim bureaucracy should be impeached.
Musk’s ire against the judiciary comes after a New York-based judge temporarily restrained DOGE from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment systems on Saturday and other legal setbacks in recent days.
“A corrupt judge protecting corruption,” Musk, 53, raged early Sunday against US District Judge Paul Engelmayer, who blocked DOGE’s access to Treasury data. “He needs to be impeached NOW!”
“This ruling is absolutely insane!” he fumed in another post. “How on Earth are we supposed to stop fraud and waste of taxpayer money without looking at how money is spent? That’s literally impossible! Something super shady is going to protect scammers.”
The world’s richest man also declared “it’s time” in response to an X post from user “Insurrection Barbie” who asked about having a “serious conversation about starting to impeach some of these judges.”
Musk further concurred with a post from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) who argued “This has the feel of a coup—not a military coup, but a judicial one” and Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R-Calif.) announced plans to roll out legislation that would grant DOGE access to the Treasury data.
Engelmayer’s emergency order on Saturday to temporarily cut off DOGE’s access to Treasury data came in response to a lawsuit filed Friday from New York Attorney General Letitia James and 18 other Democratic state attorney generals.
They argued in their suit that the access the Treasury gave to Musk and his DOGE team exceeded the department’s statutory authority.
Engelmayer, an Obama appointee, temporarily cut off access to the Treasury’s payment systems pending further litigation and concluded that while the lawsuit plays out, there is a risk of “irreparable harm” and of sensitive data leaks.
He further ruled that anyone who had been granted special access to the data should “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.”
At the start of February, Democrats began sounding the alarms over the access that the DOGE team garnered to the Treasury’s payment systems which oversee trillions of dollars in outlays annually.
One of the most famous members of the DOGE team is a 19-year-old known as “Big Balls,” who has a hacker background.
Another employee, who is a 25-year-old Rutgers University graduate, had been caught making racist statements on social media including “Normalize Indian hate” and “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”
The posts have since been deleted. The 25-year-old was initially fired but Musk later backed rehiring him.
Given some of those employees’ histories, critics raised concerns about the vetting that went into the DOGE team and the access they have to sensitive data even if it’s on “read-only.”
Musk sees the Treasury data as paramount to his plans of auditing the federal government.
There have also been other recent snags in court to initiatives from the Trump administration championed by DOGE to attack federal spending.
For example, on Friday, US District Judge Carl Nichols from the US District Court for the District of Columbia, a Trump appointee, pumped the brakes on plans to place 2,200 employees at the US Agency for International Development on administrative leave.
Last week, another judge also halted the Trump administration’s buyout offer to some 2.3 million employees, which would’ve allowed them to resign and receive pay through September.
Musk had made a similar proposal on the 2024 campaign trail.
DOGE, which is a rebranded version of the US Digital Service, is expected to come under further legal scrutiny in the weeks and months ahead as critics attempt to scuttle its efforts to revamp the federal government.
Democrats and other critics have argued that DOGE — which is not officially a part of the government — as well as the Trump administration broadly have been overstepping their authority and should push their efforts to reshape the government through Congress.
