Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, WHITE HOUSE NEWS—DOGE staffer who was given access to Bureau of the Fiscal Service payment records resigns, (Feb 7, 2025)

By Brandi O. Brown, J.D.

Though a federal court signed off on his access on Wednesday, he resigned on Thursday after reports surfaced of his allegedly racist and xenophobic tweets; now Musk appears to be planning to bring him back.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in the District of Columbia signed off on a consent order in a lawsuit that had been filed by Alliance for Retired Americans seeking declaratory and injunctive relief to “halt” the Secretary of the Treasury, the Department, and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service from “unlawful ongoing, systematic, and continuous disclosure of personal and financial information contained in Defendants’ records to Elon Musk and other members of the so-called ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE), or to any other person.”

Consent order. In the consent order, filed on Thursday, the court allowed two named DOGE-related “Special Government Employee[s] in the Department of the Treasury” to access payment records or payment systems of records maintained by or within the Bureau of the Fiscal Service “as needed for the performance of [their] duties, provided that such access to payment records will be ‘read only[.]’”

As recounted in the lawsuit, as well as at least one other that has been filed relating to similar actions by DOGE in other federal agencies, “[w]ithin a week of being sworn in” Secretary Bessent had placed on leave the civil servant who had previously denied Elon Musk’s team access to the Bureau’s records “and granted DOGE-affiliated individuals full access to the Bureau’s data and the computer systems that house them. He did so without making any public announcement, providing any legal justification or explanation for his decision, or undertaking the process required by law for altering the agency’s disclosure policies.”

As described by the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Bessent, “The scale of the intrusion into individuals’ privacy is massive and unprecedented.”

Named staffer’s tweets. And now, one of the two individuals named specifically in the court order, who had also previously worked for Musk, has resigned on the same day after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his association with a social media account (which reportedly previously went by his personal username) that posted allegedly racist and offensive comments as recently as last year. Some of the offensive comments reportedly tweeted from the re-named account: “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth,” “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” and “Normalize Indian hate.”

Bring him back? Bessent has said that he personally interviewed one of the two employees, although it is not clear which one. And this morning, Musk took to X, which he acquired in 2022, to conduct what appears to be a public survey about rehiring the worker he concedes was the pseudonymous writer of the tweets in question. “Bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym?” Musk tweeted, giving users of the social media platform options to vote “yes” or “no.”

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