By Katelyn Polantz and Tierney Sneed

(CNN) — Two Treasury Department employees affiliated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will keep limited access to the highly sensitive payment system within the agency, following emergency court proceedings Wednesday that arose out of privacy concerns about DOGE’s access to the system.

The Trump administration agreed to the limitation that the two Treasury employees have “read-only” access to the system and won’t share it with others working with DOGE, a new court filing said. A federal judge still must sign off on the proposal but signaled earlier in the day she would be willing to do so.

The proposal would keep the status quo since DOGE sent two special government employees to the Treasury Department, Tom Krause and Marko Elez, who both came from tech jobs to Washington since Donald Trump took office.

Unions representing federal workers had sued following reporting, including from CNN, that DOGE had sought access to the system that doles out $5 trillion in government payments a year. It also distributes crucial payments that deal with sensitive personal data of Americans, including for tax returns, Social Security and federal worker salaries.

The next hearing in the case is set for the end of the month.

Government attorneys shed little light on DOGE

During a hearing on the access earlier Wednesday, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the DC District Court tried to nail down how Musk and his DOGE team are accessing the department’s sensitive payments system.

But government attorneys provided little detail on DOGE’s mission and had few definitive answers.

Lawyers for the Justice Department told Kollar-Kotelly that Musk himself and the White House hadn’t seen copies of the sensitive personal data contained in the department’s payments system, as federal workers have feared.

“Not that I’m aware of,” the DOJ attorney, Brad Humphreys, hedged at the court hearing Wednesday.

“I don’t know if I can say nothing has been done” with records in the system, Humphreys said, adding that the Justice Department doesn’t believe Americans’ privacy has been breached at this time.

The hearing is one of the first where Musk’s attempts to remake the federal government via DOGE and his tech-focused affiliates have come under scrutiny. The court proceedings are likely to draw out more answers in the coming days about DOGE and one of its most explosive forays into the inner-workings of the federal government.

The Treasury payment system distributes Americans’ tax returns, Social Security benefits, disability payments and federal employees’ salaries — all information with significant privacy laws protecting it.

Humphreys explained that DOGE itself is only setting “high-level policy” across the administration, and people working with DOGE are attempting to implement that policy in agencies.

Two people affiliated with Musk, DOGE and the executive office of the president are now employees at the Treasury Department, the Justice Department confirmed in court.

The two men now have access to the computer system that’s used by Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service to cut more than $5 trillion in checks for the federal government each year, Humphreys told the judge.

Elez and Krause are special government employees — the same contractor-like designation that Musk also has as a new federal employee. Both Elez and Krause came to the government from technology companies in the private sector after Trump took office.

The two men don’t have the ability to make changes to the Treasury payments system, nor does the Justice Department believe the employees have they shared it or discussed it with anyone outside of the Treasury Department, Humphreys told the judge.

“It strikes me as likely that they have discussed information they’ve seen with other Treasury employees, but I’m not sure,” Humphreys added.

Humphreys said his legal team at the Justice Department tried “to assure ourselves and the court that information is not being illegally disclosed, to our knowledge.”

But the privacy concerns remain over the sanctity of the payments system, including Social Security numbers and tax information.

“We don’t have much facts, other than what’s out in the media,” the judge told the lawyers at the hearing.

The Treasury Department has long kept the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s payments system opaque to all but a small group of Treasury employees, whose official duties necessitate their use of it.

“It’s impossible to unbreak the egg,” said Nandan Joshi, one of the lawyers suing on behalf of federal workers’ unions tells the judge, regarding privacy within the payments system.

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