President Trump rebuked a federal judge’s decision that the Treasury Department should block access to anyone “other than civil servants with a need for access to perform their job duties” from its payment systems.
“I disagree with it 100 percent; I think it’s crazy. We have to solve the efficiency problem; we have to solve the fraud, waste, abuse,” Trump told Fox News’s Bret Baier when asked for his take on the ruling in a pretaped interview that aired Sunday.
He later told reporters on Sunday that he was disappointed and called the ruling a disgrace.
“When a president can’t look for fraud and waste and abuse, we don’t have a country anymore. So, we’re very disappointed with the judges that would make such a ruling, but we have a long way to go. We have to look; we have to find all of the fraud that’s going on. We have tremendous fraud, tremendous waste and tremendous abuse and theft, by the way,” Trump said.
“No judge should frankly be allowed to make that kind of a decision, it’s a disgrace,” he added.
U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer’s overnight ruling Saturday explicitly prohibits special government employees and those detailed from outside the department from getting access to the Treasury Department systems, a designation that would cover billionaire technology entrepreneur Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Trump, in the Fox interview, also referred to “fraud” at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which has been essentially shuttered as DOGE takes over several departments to make cuts, in bashing the ruling.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars in money that’s going to places where it shouldn’t be going,” Trump said. “It’s a big scam.”
“There’s some good money and we can do that through any one of a number — I think I’d rather give it to Marco Rubio over at the State Department, let him take care of the few good ones,” Trump said.
Engelmayer, an appointee of former President Obama, ruled that anyone who is now blocked to immediately destroy any material they’ve already downloaded.
Musk on Sunday called for Engelmayer’s impeachment, calling him “corrupt” and accusing him of “protecting corruption.”
The ruling will last until at least Friday, when another judge who is permanently overseeing the case brought by 19 Democratic state attorneys general, will hold a hearing in New York about whether to grant a longer pause.
Musk’s efforts to win access to the systems of various federal agencies have provoked a number of legal actions, and DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department payment systems has raised particular concerns among Democrats.
In response to a legal challenge brought by a coalition of unions, the Trump administration earlier this week agreed to limit access to two personnel to the Treasury Department payment systems until the next stage of the case.
Updated at 5:46 p.m. EDT