Dem
47
GOP
53
Trillions of dollars in payments go through the Treasury Department's payment system every year. Having access to that system would allow someone to know exactly what the government was spending all its money on. For DOGEy Elon Musk, getting access would be like finding the Holy Grail. He could put all the numbers in a spreadsheet, sort by amount, and have a good guide to where to cut. This is much, much better than some random pie chart he found on the Internet, like this:
The former top official at the Treasury in charge of disbursements, a 35-year career civil servant named David Lebryk, opposed giving Musk or anyone outside of Treasury access to the system. On Friday, Donald Trump first placed Lebryk on administrative leave. Shortly thereafter, Lebryk "retired." The circumstances of his retirement have not been announced.
Now, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has granted access to the payment system to Tom Krause, CEO of Cloud Software Group, who works "closely" with Musk. Reportedly, said access is READ_ONLY, not READ_WRITE. However, in many operating systems, there is no way to mark a user as READ_ONLY. Normally access rights are assigned to individual files and directories, not to specific users. Some database systems allow more narrow access rights though and some encrypt files on the disk, so getting read or write access at the operating system level isn't worth anything.
The Department has an agency, the Bureau of Fiscal Service, that has an office tasked with blocking or recovering improper payments. Musk once tweeted: "The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups. They literally never denied a payment in their entire career." He offered no evidence, and this is probably a flat-out lie, since why would Treasury create a bureau to root out fraud and then order it never to do so? So clearly there are people who have the power to block payments. And now we have to take the officials at their word that Krause and Musk won't somehow get this power.
But even READ_ONLY access to all payments could endanger national security, because payments to spies and U.S. assets around the world also go through the payments system and Musk does not have a security clearance, as far as we know (although Trump could have granted him one without any background check at all). Only folks with the highest level of security clearance and a need to know get access to that kind of information.
And yesterday, Musk basically admitted that he actually does have READ_WRITE access to the payment system. He vowed to cancel hundreds of millions worth of government grants on his own authority.
This would amount to impounding the congressional appropriations. Would that be legal? There is a Watergate-era law stating that the president does not have the authority to impound funds, but as far as we know, there is no law specifically banning DOGEys (or private citizens generally) from doing it. It never occurred to Congress that someday a private citizen holding no Senate-confirmed position would have the ability to do that. It could get messy. And if Musk really does it, it will ignite a firestorm that might infuriate Trump because he could think Musk is getting too big for his britches.
It is also possible that some members of Congress are thinking: "I spent weeks working on a bill and did a lot of negotiation with members of both parties to make it a good bill and I shepherded it through Congress. Now some guy who is not an elected official and is not a presidential nominee confirmed by the Senate decides he doesn't like it and hits DEL to kill the disbursement that bill created? WTF? Who is running the country?"
Jonathan Martin, Politico's senior political columnist, made a similar point in his column yesterday. Martin at first thought Musk would ultimately get the axe due to his competing for attention with Trump. But now he thinks the break might be triggered by policy instead. Musk wants to reduce the size of the government. That is a policy issue. Trump doesn't give a f**k about the size of the government. He cares mostly about getting "wins" that get him lots of praise from right-wing media outlets. Laura Ingraham doesn't give a hoot about the size of the government. If Musk cuts $1 trillion from the budget, she won't even mention it.
Martin points out that the plane crash in D.C. last week should have been a teaching moment for Musk. What lesson should he have taken away? When the plane went down, Trump blamed DEI. Or more generally, when something goes wrong on his watch, Trump always blames someone or something else. ALWAYS. If Musk cuts something out of the budget and someone or some important group squeals (which is likely), Musk will get the blame. Musk may not realize this yet. For Trump, the only thing that matters is Trump winning. Policy is secondary, at best.
And to the extent Trump does care about policy, he is not a deficit hawk. During Trump v1.0, there was a COVID epidemic, as you may or may not fondly remember. What did Trump do? He had IRS send taxpayers a $1,200 check with his name printed on the checks and put the bill on the national credit card. This is not something a deficit hawk would ever do. He cared about his name on the checks, not the $100 billion bill. The same is true of every policy issue. What he cares about is getting credit and avoiding blame. Musk would do well to learn this very quickly, lest he get deported to South Africa for working illegally on a student visa when he first arrived in the U.S. (V)