WASHINGTON >> Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., sent a letter Monday to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent demanding answers for why the so-called Department of Government Efficiency was granted access to the federal payments system, giving unelected billionaire Elon Musk and his team a powerful tool that could be used to track and potentially limit government spending.

Also Monday, the Treasury Department was accused in a lawsuit of breaking federal law by giving Musk’s team of government efficiency enforcers that access — setting up a legal showdown over the Trump administration’s signature effort to shrink the government.

Union groups, including the AFL-CIO, and the Alliance for Retired Americans said in a lawsuit that Treasury and Bessent had illegally allowed their members’ records to be shared with Musk’s group, known as DOGE. President Donald Trump has put Musk in charge of an effort to modernize federal information technology.

Warren’s letter

Warren’s letter is a sign of mounting outrage among Democrats over the unorthodox efforts that the Trump administration and Musk are preparing to take control of how congressionally approved funds are spent. The questions come after a career civil servant named David Lebryk abruptly resigned Friday after requests to grant Musk’s lieutenants access to Treasury’s payment system.

“It is extraordinarily dangerous to meddle with the critical systems that process trillions of dollars of transactions each year, are essential to preventing a default on federal debt, and ensure that tens of millions of Americans receive their Social Security checks, tax refunds and Medicare benefits,” wrote Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee.

The senator asked Bessent to explain what Treasury systems were made accessible to staff affiliated with Musk’s department, what they intended to do with the data and what safeguards were in place to protect Americans’ private information.

“I am alarmed that as one of your first acts as secretary, you appear to have handed over a highly sensitive system responsible for millions of Americans’ private data — and a key function of government — to an unelected billionaire and an unknown number of his unqualified flunkies,” wrote Warren, who also sits on the Senate Finance Committee.

The Musk allies who have been granted access to the payment system were made Treasury employees, passed government background checks and obtained the necessary security clearances, according to two people familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. While their access was approved, the Musk representatives have yet to gain operational abilities and no government payments have been blocked, the people said.

“We will do everything in our power in the Senate and the House to stop this outrage,” Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said. “And in the meantime, since we don’t have many Republican colleagues who want to help us, we are doing everything we can with our colleagues through the courts to make sure that we uphold the rule of law.”

Republicans defend Musk as simply carrying out Trump’s slash-and-burn campaign promises. Trump made no secret of his desire to put Musk, the entrepreneur behind the electric automaker Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX, in charge of retooling the federal government.

“Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday.

Musk has also turned his attention to the General Services Administration, or GSA, which manages federal government buildings. An email sent last week from the Washington headquarters instructed regional managers to begin terminating leases on roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide.

The initiative is being led by Nicole Hollander, according to an agency employee who requested anonymity. Hollander describes herself on LinkedIn as an employee at X, Musk’s social media platform.

At Treasury

Musk on Sunday accused career Treasury officials of “breaking the law every hour of every day by approving payments that are fraudulent or do not match the funding laws passed by Congress.”

The misleading accusation, which he lobbed without evidence on X, is the only official explanation the Trump administration has provided about its interest in scrutinizing the Treasury Department’s payment system. The system is typically run by civil servants at Treasury, which carries out payments submitted by agencies across the government and disbursed more than $5 trillion in the 2023 fiscal year.

The Treasury Department has declined to comment about the matter, and neither a press representative for Treasury nor a DOGE representative responded to emailed requests for comment on the lawsuit. The unions are represented by lawyers from Public Citizen Litigation Group and State Democracy Defenders Fund.

Musk’s work has unnerved federal employees who are being nudged toward the exits. On Sunday night, concerns swept through the workforce that they could be locked out of internal human resources system, denying them access to their own personnel files. Supervisors in some agencies encouraged employees to download their records, called an SF-50, to personal computers so that they could prove their employment history in the event of disputes.

This report contains information from the Associated Press and Bloomberg News.