A government watchdog is to launch an inquiry into security over the US treasury’s payments system as a judge on Friday considered whether Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) access to the highly sensitive data base was unconstitutional.
Amid mounting court cases concerning Doge’s activities, the treasury department’s inspector general said it would launch an audit over after Democrats complained about the access gained to a 25-year-old Musk associate, Marko Elez, who was briefly granted edit access within the system, meaning he had the potential to change entries.
Its launch coincided with a judge in Washington considering a legal suit lodged by Democrat attorneys general from 14 states, arguing that Doge’s work was illegal on the alleged grounds that Trump violated the US constitution by creating a federal government department without congressional approval.
Loren Sciurba, the treasury’s deputy inspector general, said the audit would review the past two years of the system’s transactions to examine Musk’s claim that his team has uncovered evidence of billions of dollars of fraudulent payments.
The attorneys general asked the court to order Musk to identify how “any data obtained through unlawful agency access was used” and to destroy any “unauthorised access in his or Doge’s possession”.
