WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s effort to shrink the federal government, led by billionaire Elon Musk and known as the U.S. DOGE Service, is in the spotlight once again and facing a fresh legal challenge, this time over access to systems at the IRS.
In the latest bid to curb a whirlwind of actions by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in the first few weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House through the courts, a group of unions and tax groups filed a lawsuit Monday seeking to stop it from accessing taxpayer data at the IRS.
In the suit, the groups — which include Center for Taxpayer Rights, the Main Street Alliance and two unions representing government employees — argue DOGE has launched a “sweeping campaign to access highly-sensitive information systems” and is violating multiple laws “at every step.”
“DOGE’s spread through the government continues to be rapid, now reaching the Internal Revenue Service ('IRS'),” the groups wrote in the filing. “This case seeks to protect the privacy and the legal rights of millions of Americans, and thousands of small business owners, who depend upon the IRS.”
It comes after the top Democratic members of the Senate Finance and Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committees, Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, sought to sound the alarm that potential access to IRS systems by officials associated with DOGE could violate taxpayer privacy and data protection laws.
In a letter sent to acting IRS Commissioner Douglas O’Donnell, the Democratic senators pointed to reports that the White House is “pressuring” the IRS to sign onto a memorandum giving DOGE software engineers access to the IRS Integrated Data Retrieval System, known as IDRS. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Such a move, the pair argued, would give such officials access to the private tax return information of individual Americans and businesses and raises “serious concerns that Elon Musk and his associates are seeking to weaponize government databases containing private bank records and other confidential information to target American citizens and businesses as part of a political agenda.”
In response, Wyden and Warren asked to be provided with copies of any such memorandum being considered as well as justifications for DOGE needing to view tax returns and private bank records.
The senators also warned that DOGE efforts at the IRS during tax filing season, which ends April 15 and will likely see more than 140 million individual returns come in, according to the IRS, could delay Americans receiving their tax refunds.
The move, reported first by The Washington Post over the weekend, marks DOGE’s latest attempt to seek information that could aid its wide-spread government cost-cutting campaign. Its efforts to access government data at the Treasury Department in particular received significant attention and is currently working its way through the legal system.
Appearing on Fox News on Monday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller referred to the need for DOGE to access the systems as a “basic anti-fraud review” to check that no “large scale theft” of federal taxpayer benefits is taking place. He noted that DOGE is restoring “neutrality, ethics, accountability” to the IRS.