The order came in response to a lawsuit filed by 19 attorneys general accusing the president of failing to faithfully execute the nation’s laws when he let DOGE comb through federal computer systems.

The broadside against the court order signals tensions ahead between the White House and the judiciary.

The US Treasury Department’s payment servers hold the tax returns, social security data and bank account numbers of every adult citizen of the United States. They are, one would assume, among the most highly secured servers on earth and yet it seems that all the employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) needed to do to access these systems after January 20 was to walk into Treasury Department offices and demand access to the servers’ credentials.