This post first appeared on Government Executive. Read the original article.
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A coalition of labor organizations filed a lawsuit in the Washington, D.C. District Court on Monday against the Treasury Department, alleging that it unlawfully shared confidential personal and financial data with the Department of Government Efficiency led by billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk.
The suit was filed by the Alliance for Retired Americans, the American Federation of Government Employees and the Service Employees International Union, represented by the Public Citizen Litigation Group and the State Democracy Defenders Fund.
The plaintiffs argue that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent permitted DOGE to access sensitive government-held data while allegedly taking punitive actions against officials who attempted to prevent the disclosure. The New York Times and other outlets recently reported that Bessent granted DOGE representatives access to Treasury systems that facilitate the government’s accounting and spending mechanisms. A similar matter is unfolding at USAID.
According to the complaint, federal laws strictly limit access to such data, and sharing it with unauthorized entities constitutes a violation of privacy protections. The plaintiffs contend that the Treasury Department’s actions have resulted in a “systematic, continuous, and ongoing violation of federal laws that protect the privacy of personal information contained in federal records.”
DOGE is a cost-cutting unit embedded by Trump into what used to be the U.S. Digital Service and has since been renamed the U.S. DOGE service. The lawsuit seeks an immediate injunction to block further data sharing and enforce federal privacy protections. The Treasury Department has not yet publicly responded to the allegations.
In a separate but related move, anonymous plaintiffs requested a restraining order Tuesday that would bar the Office of Personnel Management from continuing to use a recently installed mass-email system that may have circumvented standard cyber compliance and contracting laws.
Nearly two weeks ago, an email landing in employees’ inboxes from the address hr@opm.gov told recipients that it was a “test of a new distribution and response list” and asked them to reply “YES” to it. Many workers suspected it was a phishing email and reported it to their IT departments.
A second test email went out the following day, and federal employees were later sent a deferred resignation offer using the same system shortly thereafter, saying they would be paid until Sept. 30 — provided they resign by Feb. 6.
The requested restraining order cited Nextgov/FCW reporting indicating that, just days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, OPM did not have the capability to send a mass email of that scale. The lawsuit connected to that restraining order alleges that OPM violated the E-Government Act of 2002 by failing to conduct and publish required Privacy Impact Assessments before deploying the new email arrangement to collect the responses from government employees.
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