No. of Recommendations: 10
This is assuming that the data under question is the raw stuff and they were just letting the DOGE people spelunk through it all. I have no idea one way or the other.
Yep. Again, though, it's pretty likely that whatever DOGE was trying to get contained personal identifying information, else the order wouldn't have addressed it and ordered Treasury to stop allowing access to that type of information.
To me, it's perfectly reasonable to ask "What does the government spend its cash on?" and then proceed to trace where all that money goes.
Sure. But these cases aren't about whether it's reasonable to ask what the government spends its cash on (of course it is), but which particular data sets and systems can be accessed by whom. Look at the converse - it's also reasonable to ask "Where does the government get its cash?" without insisting on having access to the IRS' database of every individual tax return.
By all accounts, DOGE wanted to do something very different in how they collected information on how the government spends its cash. Rather than do "ordinary" audits or go through the agencies, they wanted to find that out through the Treasury payments systems. The problem is that the Treasury payments system has a lot of information in it that goes beyond "What the government spends its money on," and that information isn't permissibly shared outside of Treasury. So Treasury got enjoined, at least for now.
