Letitia James Gets Obama Judge to Order DOGE to Stop Auditing Treasury's Books

A federal judge issued an order Saturday that purports to not only stop the US DOGE Service, which is part of the Executive Office of the President, from accessing data on federal payments but also prohibits Treasury officials from accessing the system managed by that agency. Buying into a tenuous, one might say bull**** claim of "irreparable harm," a leftist Obama appointee serving in the Southern District of New York blocked access to Treasury systems and demanded Trump's audit team "immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems, if any.”

The whole decision is much more lucid if you snort a couple of lines of blow, ingest a handful of psilocybin, and then huff a tube of glue. This is the reasoning. According to Judge Paul A. Englemayer:

The States contend that this policy, inter alia, violates the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”), 5 U.S.C. §§ 551 et seq., in multiple respects; exceeds the statutory authority of the Department of the Treasury; violates the separation of powers doctrine; and violates the Take Care Clause of the United States Constitution.

What he never bothers to explain is how state attorneys general have any standing to challenge the internal workflows of the Treasury Department, how auditing a system within the Treasury Department is beyond the power of the Treasury Department, how the Executive Branch can violate the separation of powers by carrying out an audit, or how DOGE's action is anything other than the epitome of the "Take Care Clause" which would seem to anyone without TDS to require laws to be obeyed.

It should be to no one's shock that the lead clown in this pathetic circus of TDS sufferers is Letitia James.

The complaint presents a veritable "parade of horribles" of things that "might" happen, which, even if true, fall in the "not your circus, not your monkey" category of complaints.

“Defendants’ new expanded access policy poses huge cybersecurity risks that put vast amounts of funding for the States and their residents in peril,” says the lawsuit filed late Friday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. “All of the States’ residents whose [personally identifiable information] and sensitive financial information is stored in the payment files … are at risk of having that information compromised and used against them.”

Remember the good old days when "standing" was required to pursue legal action and "real harm," not childish fears, were required? We are back to the days of Trump's "Muslim ban" in 2017, where every virtue-signalling leftist judge in the country allowed any claim to be made just to get their whack in on Trump.

This will turn out to be more performative than real. When a federal judge ordered a halt to Trump's spending freeze (see Biden Judge Puts Trump's Spending Freeze on Hold and Orders the Feeding Trough Opened), the administration essentially answered, "yeah, no."

Defendants do not read the Order to prevent the President or his advisors from communicating with federal agencies or the public about the President’s priorities regarding federal spending. Nor do Defendants construe the Order as enjoining the President’s Executive Orders, which are plainly lawful and unchallenged in this case. Further, Defendants do not read the Order as imposing compliance obligations on federal agencies that are not Defendants in this case. Defendants respectfully request that the Court notify Defendants if they have misunderstood the intended scope of the Court’s Order.

In another court, a federal judge heard the same dog's breakfast of "really bad things might happen," in another case and tossed it; see Judge Slaps Back AFL-CIO Challenge to DOGE Access to Department of Labor Records.

We'll soon see how Attorney General Bondi responds to this nonsense and if she's willing to draw a line at this sort of judicial overreach. If she goes along with it, it effectively means that the President literally does not have the authority to give directions to the Executive Branch, and the Treasury Secretary cannot establish policies in his agency without getting the approval of some judge somewhere based on the complaint of random people.