The Trump administration is pushing back against a federal court order blocking Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing critical payment systems in the Treasury Department.

Attorneys in the Justice Department wrote an 11-page court filing late Sunday night that the order was “impermissible” and “anti-constitutional,” claiming that “basic democratic accountability requires that every executive agency’s work be supervised by politically accountable leadership, who ultimately answer to the president.”

The attorneys addressed their complaint to U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas in Manhattan, asking her to stop or modify the order and allow Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other Trump-appointed leaders to be briefed on the payment system. The original order blocking the DOGE takeover came from U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer on Saturday, who restricted access to career employees with proper training.

The order was the result of a lawsuit from 19 Democratic attorneys general over the access DOGE was given in the Treasury Department, alleging that Musk’s cronies were putting the critical federal payments system, which manages trillions of dollars in federal disbursements, at risk of manipulation or hacking.

According to Politico, DOJ lawyers are negotiating with the 19 states for an agreement to make Engelmayer’s order more narrowly tailored. On Monday, Vargas said that if there was no agreement by 5 p.m., she would demand an expedited review by late Monday night.

Trump allies are furious over the order, claiming that it could even bar Bessent, confirmed by the Senate, from running his own department. Some of them have even suggested ignoring the order, Politico reports. Still, the DOJ says that Treasury officials are complying with the order.

One of Musk’s henchmen, Marko Elez, reportedly had administrative access to sensitive federal payment systems and was even rewriting code, before resigning after his racist social media posts came to light last week. In X posts last week, Musk suggested that Elez would be rehired, but the Justice Department’s court filing only states that he resigned and that he returned materials and equipment.

DOGE employees have been allowed access in not just the Treasury Department but all over the federal government, including the Department of Energy, which manages the country’s nuclear arsenal, and the agency that manages the federal workforce, the Office of Personnel Management.

In some cases, federal court orders have restricted or even barred DOGE’s access, but Trump, Musk, and Vice President JD Vance are openly discussing defying the federal judiciary and igniting a constitutional crisis. The next several months will be pivotal not just for the future of the federal government, but also for the country.

Donald Trump is fleshing out his idea of taking over the Gaza Strip—but it doesn’t include any long-term contingencies other than carving up the nation to be consumed by other countries in the Middle East.

“The White House press secretary told us last week that you’re committed to rebuilding Gaza. Steve Witkoff said that process would take 10 to 15 years,” started a reporter in the room, referring to the real estate developer and U.S. special envoy to the Middle East. “Does your commitment to rebuilding Gaza extend beyond your time in office?”

“I’m committed to buying and owning Gaza,” Trump said. “As far as us rebuilding it, we may give it to other states in the Middle East to build sections of it.

“We’re committed to owning it, taking it, and making sure that Hamas doesn’t move back,” Trump continued. “There’s nothing to move back into—the place is a demolition site. The remainder will be demolished. Everything’s demolished.

“I mean you can’t live in those buildings right now, they’re very unstable, but we’ll make it into a very good site for future development by somebody.”

That somebody could be Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has been eyeing the region for potential real estate projects since at least the beginning of last year. In March, Kushner praised Gaza’s waterfront beachfront property as “very valuable,” advocating at the time for the same plan that Trump touted last week: ethnic cleansing.

“It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up,” Kushner told Harvard’s Middle East Initiative faculty chair Tarek Masoud on March 8. “But I don’t think that Israel has stated that they don’t want the people to move back there afterwards.”

The definition of ethnic cleansing is the mass expulsion or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group in a society, per the Oxford English Dictionary. Ethnic cleansing has not been identified as an independent crime under international law, according to the United Nations.

“People can come from all over the world and live there,” Trump continued during the press conference Monday. “But we’re going to take care of the Palestinians. We’re going to make sure they live beautifully and in harmony and in peace and that they’re not murdered.

“This has been the most dangerous site anywhere in the world to live,” Trump added, not mentioning the fact that mass casualties in Gaza have overwhelmingly been at Israel’s hands.

By last week, more than 61,000 Palestinians had been killed in the war with Israel, per the Gaza Government Information Office. Over 15 months of fighting, Israel has cut off access to water, electricity, and food in the region under the banner of rooting out Hamas soldiers behind the October 7, 2023, attack. With the aid of American taxpayer dollars, they also decimated hospitals, health clinics, pharmacies, and shelters for millions of people in Gaza. Among those dead are 17,881 children, including 214........

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