In a series of weekend social media exchanges Elon Musk suggested that judges who have thrown up roadblocks to the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) crusade to trim bureaucracy and root out waste, fraud and abuse should be impeached.
“A corrupt judge protecting corruption,” Musk, 53, posted early Sunday after US District Judge Paul Engelmayer, blocked DOGE’s access to Treasury data. “He needs to be impeached NOW!”
“This ruling is absolutely insane!” he argued in another post. “How on Earth are we supposed to stop fraud and waste of taxpayer money without looking at how money is spent? That’s literally impossible! Something super shady is going to protect scammers.”
In response to an X post from user “Insurrection Barbie” who asked about having a “serious conversation about starting to impeach some of these judges,” Mr. Musk replied, “it’s time.”
Principled limited government constitutional conservative Senator Mike Lee of Utah also entered the conversation posting “This has the feel of a coup—not a military coup, but a judicial one.”
And when you look at how US District Judge Paul Engelmayer, an Obama appointee, came to enter the order barring DOGE staff from doing their work at Treasury Senator Lee is right.
According to reporting by James Morley III of Newsmax, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency team said personnel at the Treasury Department suspect roughly $1 billion a week of entitlement payments are "unequivocal and obvious fraud."
Mr. Musk posted on X, "Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious.
"When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!! This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately.
Mr. Morley reported Musk posted on Saturday on his social media platform X: "To be clear, what the @DOGE team and @USTreasury have jointly agreed makes sense is the following:
"- Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible.
"- All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!
"- The DO-NOT-PAY list of entities known to be fraudulent or people who are dead or are probable fronts for terrorist organizations or do not match Congressional appropriations must actually be implemented and not ignored. Also, it can currently take up to a year to get on this list, which is far too long. This list should be updated at least weekly, if not daily," he continued.
Mr. Musk wrote in a subsequent post: "Nobody in Treasury management cared enough before. I do want to credit the working level people in Treasury who have wanted to do this for many years, but have been stopped by prior management.”
So, how did Judge Engelmayer come to issue an order protecting this vast scheme of corruption?
Nineteen Democratic state Attorneys General filed suit. Not about the fraud. Not about the waste. Not about billions vanishing into accounts without SSNs. But about "protecting" the Treasury Department from its own Secretary.
It’s hard to understand how the nineteen Democratic state Attorneys General even had standing to file such a suit, let alone prevail in their request for a temporary restraining order.
But it gets worse.
According to reporting by the team at EKO, it was done through an ex parte order blocking Treasury officials from accessing their own department's data. No warning. No chance to respond. No opportunity to present evidence. Just a wall between the people elected to fix the system and the system itself.
Think about what that means: The Secretary of the Treasury—effectively the CFO of the United States government, without the government even being present at the hearing, was legally barred from seeing how money moves through his own department. And of course, the young coders mapping the missing controls were ordered to stop looking.
Rep. Darrell Issa (CA-48) announced plans to introduce legislation that would grant DOGE access to the Treasury data, but there’s no telling how long that could take.
No doubt Attorney General Pam Bondi and her team will move to overturn this outrageous ruling as fast as possible, but there must be consequences for federal judges who overstep their authority to achieve political ends that are rightly within the constitutional purview of the Executive and Legislative branches of government.
The Capitol Switchboard is (202-224-3121), we urge CHQ readers and friends to call their Representative and Senators to demand they impeach US District Judge Paul Engelmayer for this outrageous breach of the Constitution’s separation of powers and disregard for procedural due process in this case.
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