The world’s richest man may now have access to the confidential personal information of every taxpayer in the United States. According to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Friday granted Elon Musk and his minions at the faux-agency DOGE full access to the Treasury’s massive federal payment system. As with the rest of Musk’s wide-reaching project within the U.S. government under Donald Trump, it’s not at all clear what he plans to do with this unprecedented access.
Also on Friday, the top civil servant at the Treasury Department, David Lebryk, was apparently ousted after he refused to give Department of Government Efficiency officials access to the system — or rather, per the Times, he “was put on leave and then suddenly retired on Friday after the dispute, according to people familiar with his exit.”
Lebryk had worked at Treasury for three decades, and had been the Trump-named acting Treasury secretary until Bessent was confirmed by the Senate on Monday. Adds the Washington Post:
Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration. Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley executive who has now been detailed to Treasury, is among those involved, the people said. Krause did not respond to requests for comment. …
Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.
And as the Journal highlights:
Any interruption in its operation could result in far-reaching economic disruption. During negotiations over raising the debt ceiling, concerns about the continued performance of the payment system are at the core of the anxiety on Wall Street and in Washington.
The Journal also reports that “a person familiar with the arrangement said DOGE representatives won’t have direct authority to stop individual payments or make other changes, describing their access as ‘read only’”:
Bessent approved the arrangement on the condition that the DOGE representatives’ activity be documented and monitored. DOGE representatives intend to review the overall efficiency of the payment system, the person said.
The report doesn’t specific who might be doing that monitoring; the Treasury Department’s inspector general was one of the 15 independent agency watchdogs the Trump White House purged a week ago.
So now Musk and DOGE have access to and potentially power over what is basically America’s checkbook, weeks before another debt ceiling crisis looms, at a time when Musk is vowing to somehow cut a hysterically large amount of federal spending, and during a chaotic period in which he and other officials in the Trump administration are running roughshod across the federal government like they have unchecked power. On Saturday, Musk was already making wild unsubstantiated claims on X about what his DOGE investigators had discovered about federal payment processes.
But again, it’s not actually clear what Musk and his DOGE and White House allies intend to do with the federal payment system or the information it holds. The executive director of the progressive economic think tank Groundwork Collaborative, Lindsay Owens, notes some troubling possibilities in an MSNBC op-ed:
First, accessing the Treasury’s payment system could be a path to freezing government funding, as the administration attempted earlier this week. Musk could halt payments to programs like Medicaid, Meals on Wheels, Head Start and more, maneuvering around the courts. Musk has already directed his engineers to find ways to turn off the flow of money to programs he and President Donald Trump oppose. With the keys to the Treasury’s payment system, he can unilaterally cut off these funds right at the source.
Musk could also get his hands on the “Do Not Pay” system that lists individuals or contractors the government has blacklisted, theoretically granting him control over whom the government does business with. Government contracts have been central to Musk’s $400 billion net worth; his companies have signed billions of dollars’ worth of government contracts. He could easily place his rivals on the Do Not Pay list or turn the spigot back on for friends who have been blacklisted.
The Treasury gatecrashing also comes at the same time that the Musk team is facilitating a “hostile takeover” of the Office of Personnel Management, which is the equivalent of the federal government’s HR department. Reuters reports that senior OPM officials have been locked out of the agency computer system and nobody knows what the DOGE people are doing with OPM’s data. That follows Musk and the DOGE denizens’ attempt to gut the federal workforce with a take-it-or-leave-it buyout email, and just before that, the Trump White House’s haphazard now-blocked attempt to freeze all federal spending with a single memo.
Political scientist Seth Masket is sounding the alarm, as well:
There are many disturbing aspects of this. But perhaps the most fundamental is that Elon Musk is not a federal employee, nor has he been appointed by the President nor approved by the Senate to have any leadership role in government. The “Department of Government Efficiency,” announced by Trump in a January 20th executive order, is not truly any sort of government department or agency, and even the executive order uses quotes in the title. It’s perfectly fine to have a marketing gimmick like this, but DOGE does not have power over established government agencies, and Musk has no role in government. It does not matter that he is an ally of the President. Musk is a private citizen taking control of established government offices. That is not efficiency; that is a coup.
And Musk got all of it for practically nothing. All it cost to gain access to America’s financial data, the government’s Social Security checkbook, and presumably every U.S. taxpayer’s personal information was $288 million in political donations to help elect Donald Trump. That’s peanuts to somebody worth more than $420 billion.
This post has been updated.
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