Judge Paul Engelmayer issued a Saturday temporary restraining order blocking Elon Musk’s band of teen tech bro interns from siphoning Treasury Department data onto private hard drives next to their BitTorrent Hobbit porn. Anyone taking the time to actually READ the opinion would see that it momentarily halts turning over the personally identifiable data of U.S. citizens to anyone who has not “passed all background checks and security clearances and taken all information security training called for in federal statutes and Treasury Department regulations” and ordered any such person who has already copied that data to delete it pending the full hearing on February 14.The government has already moved to kill the TRO arguing that it’s a violation of Article II to require the executive branch to wait LESS THAN A WEEK to make sure it’s not operating in violation of multiple explicit statutes and regulations.
Normally, requiring security clearances to look at secure data wouldn’t be controversial. But it’s 2025 and half the country already adjusted their schemas to accept hoarding nuclear codes by a toilet, so there’s a population already primed to get BIG MAD that the judiciary might not give our social security numbers to teenagers who’ve already lost jobs for being cybersecurity risks.
Somehow “A corrupt judge protecting corruption” — a message with almost 190,000 likes — is not about the Supreme Court’s refusing to enact ANY enforceable ethics code while members gobble up under-the-table luxury gifts from the rich. What a time to be alive!
To Beck’s point, it’s not so much that the Treasury Secretary cannot access any data, it’s that they cannot hand that data over to someone else on a whim. This is a function of the Privacy Act of 1974, which stated in relevant part that an agency can give access to its records “to those officers and employees of the agency…who have a need for the record in the performance of their duties.” The Tax Reform Act of 1976 says more or less the same thing about Treasury data. As you might guess from the dates, the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Tax Reform Act of 1976 exist because Richard Nixon liked using data collected for innocent purposes by one agency to illegally harass his various “enemies.” As for the claim that the Secretary can’t even get this specific data, there are regulations in place designed to prevent government employees including the Secretary from having access to certain data — like non-truncated SSNs.
Which is all to say an unelected Ketamine-head with deep ties to China and random, unvetted teens cannot just be handed access to everyone’s unfiltered financial data in the ordinary course. There are procedures laid out for the administration to get around these provisions… Trump and Musk have done none of them. That they’re melting down over the prospect of having to actually comply with the law until at least Friday tells you all you need to know about their intentions here.Yale Law grad JD Vance did his part to justify the school’s impending downgrade in the U.S. News rankings by offering a batshit take on constitutional order.
But one thing about the missive Roberts put out a month and a half ago rings true. Roberts struck back at critics of “unelected politicians in robes” by smugly pointing out that judges “typically speak only through their decisions” a callback to Justice Coney Barrett’s admonishing that critics need to “read the opinion.” These protestations may be disingenuous coming from judges who relish issuing orders without written opinions, but entirely correct that the most damning takedowns of shoddy, politically motivated court decisions are those grounded in the text of an opinion.Were Musk, Vance, and any of the other trolls attacking Judge Engelmayer to actually read the opinion, they’d find a textbook example of a legitimate TRO. The complaint alleges a massive security breach in progress, there are explicit statutes backing up these claims, the order preserves the status quo and prevents the irreparable harm of anyone from turning around and intentionally or unintentionally letting personally identifiable data fall into criminal hands while waiting for both sides to fully and fairly argue the case in LESS THAN A WEEK.James Ho invented out of the ether a concept of spiritual damages to assert an irreparable harm that “the earthly reward of monetary damages” couldn’t overcome if airline workers had to wait until the case was over to continue spreading COVID on planes. Judge Engelmayer said, here are multiple statutes dating back 50 years on this precise question and if you’re right you can go back to gathering this data next week but if you’re wrong everyone’s SSN is going to be on the dark web.
