They've been empowered by the President to do exactly as they have.

Have they? I ask that in all seriousness. Remember, this is a group that does not exactly set great store in observing bureaucratic niceties. There's all kinds of rules in a big organization like the federal government about who has access to what information, especially data that contains the personal information of private parties and individuals. Just because you're an undersecretary in Interior doesn't mean you can go over to Treasury and start looking through tax data.

The federal government doesn't operate on rhetorical, "Didn't you see the tweet on X that says that DOGE is 'empowered' to look at anything they want?" protocols. There are rules that say who has access to what.

What kinds of "classified" check-writing to do they do over there? The answer is they don't do any, and that line of argument won't fly.

There are lots of restrictions and protections on government information that aren't national security classifications. Again, almost all of Treasury's information on taxpayers is kept confidential - even Congress generally can't just look at your tax records (with few exceptions) - and so there are processes to make sure that only people that are authorized to look at that information can get to it.

The federal government payments systems will probably have within it the financial information for every person and entity that receives a check from the federal government: bank routing numbers, account numbers, TIN's, SSN's, and all manner of stuff. I would expect that it's as hard to get access to that system as it is to look at all of the Treasury's tax return files.

I don't know the details - but I would not be surprised if deputies from a newly-created department like DOGE had not been added to the list of people who were allowed access to the financial information of literally every single person and entity that's received a check from the federal government. And that the people at payments were correct in telling them they weren't allowed to see the information. An easy fix (just have someone with authority put them on the list) - and it's wrong to fire people who are correctly following the rules.