Republican Congressman Drafts Articles of Impeachment For US District Judge Who Blocked DOGE From Accessing Treasury Data

A Republican congressman announced on Tuesday morning that he is drafting articles of impeachment for US District Judge Paul Engelmayer, the Obama-appointed jurist who issued an “emergency order” on Saturday to prevent Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team from accessing Treasury Department payment and data systems.

Since Trump put him in charge of DOGE,  Musk—who briefly changed his X handle to “Harry Bolz” Tuesday—has exposed billions of dollars of wasteful and fraudulent government programs.

After meeting with Musk Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told reporters  that the DOGE chief is just getting started.

“What Elon and the DOGE effort is doing right now is what Congress has been unable to do in recent years because the agencies have hidden some of this from us,” Johnson said.

“They’re uncovering things that we have known intuitively have been there, but we couldn’t prove it. Now, the proof is being provided, and no one can argue the counter to that. So stay tuned. There’s a lot more to come,” the Speaker added.

Engelmayer’s preliminary injunction to stop Musk’s work came in response to a lawsuit filed by 19 state attorneys general who argued that allowing DOGE to have access to the Treasury systems opened the door for “the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking.”

Engelmayer,  of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York, granted the emergency relief and ordered any DOGE employee who accessed that information since Jan. 20  to “immediately destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.”

The judge even barred Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent from examining the payment systems in the very department he oversees.

Federal judges have lifetime appointments but there is a potential remedy for those who go rogue.

“I’m drafting articles of impeachment for US District Judge Paul Engelmayer,” Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) posted on X Tuesday. “Partisan judges abusing their positions are a threat to democracy.”

Crane added: “The left has done “irreparable harm” to this country. President Trump and his team at @DOGE are trying to fix it.”

On Sunday, Trump’s lawyers at the Department of Justice asked U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York Judge Jeannette Vargas to dissolve, clarify or modify Engelmayer’s temporary restraining order, arguing that the injunction was “markedly overbroad” and contained “no sound reason that it should extend to Treasury’s leadership,” according to Fedscoop.

The Trump lawyers contended that there is no basis for drawing a difference between civil servants and political appointees, and preventing the latter from performing its functions “is an extraordinary and unprecedented judicial interference with a Cabinet Secretary’s ability to oversee the Department he was constitutionally appointed to lead.”

While the case plays out in the courts, Crane argued in a separate post on X that his articles of impeachment are necessary to stop an allegedly rogue judge from issuing orders that are “obviously judicial overreach.”

“Judge Engelmayer is attempting to stop White House employees from accessing the very systems they oversee,” he wrote. “Where in the constitution does it say a President and his team cannot root out obvious waste, fraud and abuse?”

Musk himself wrote in a pinned X post early Tuesday that “Democracy in America is being destroyed by judicial coup.”

The DOGE chief added: “An activist judge is not a real judge.”

The House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency will hold it’s first hearing, titled: The War on Waste: Stamping Out the Scourge of Improper Payments and Fraud, at 10:00 ET on Wednesday,  February 12.

“We’re getting to the bottom of the $2.7 TRILLION in improper and fraudulent government payments,” said DOGE Committee Chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.). “DOGE isn’t just about rooting out the waste, fraud, and abuse. It’s about SOLVING it.”