According to reporting on Friday — first at the Washington Post and then in more detail from CNN as well as the New York Times — the Fiscal Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury David Lebryk has been put on paid administrative leave and plans to resign after refusing to give Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) access to the operational details of the Treasury’s payment system and the data it processes. In particular, Musk’s DOGE team has been asking for what the New York Times reporting refers to as “source code information” since December and has been rebuffed. The CNN reporting specifically states that they were inquiring about the technical ability to stop payments.
The danger is also not in the near future, it is here. Follow up reporting from the New York Times Saturday evening in an article straightforwardly informed readers in its headline that “Elon Musk’s Team Now Has Full Access to Treasury’s Payments System.” They could not initially confirm that any payments had yet been stopped but an updated version had further information that seemed intended by anonymous government officials to reassure people. Most notably, the New York Times took the word “full” out of the headline:
However, I find the Times reporters willingness to uncritically repeat Musk’s stated rationale for operational access extremely troubling and certainly unconvincing. I do not think Musk’s stated rationale has any additional credibility because it was repeated by anonymous Treasury officials. It’s important to understand that “improper” is in the eye of the beholder, and the danger of operational access to the payments system is precisely that there are very little safeguards for its improper use or manipulation. It turns out that the greatest barrier was David Lebryk, and he was shunted aside at the direct order of the White House.
They absolutely can shut down payments from a disfavored agency even if they can’t shut down “individual” payments operationally.
Musk and his cronies are clearly aiming to redesign the payments system to serve their agenda. The most chilling sentence is this one from the Wall Street Journal:
It couldn’t be determined what DOGE representatives intended to do with their access to the payment system. Musk and his team think the payment system should be overseen by political appointees selected by President Trump, the people said.
This is not the attitude of people who are trying to simply technocratically make the payment system more “efficient.” …. Without political control of the payment’s heart, the Trump administration and Elon Musk must chase down every agency and bend it to their will. They are in the process of doing that, but bureaucrats can notionally continue to respect the law and resist their efforts. They are helped in this effort by court injunctions they can point to. This is bureaucratic trench warfare. But if Musk and Trump can reach into the choke point, the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, they could possibly not need agency cooperation. They can just impound agency payments themselves. They could also possibly stop paying federal employees they have forced on paid administrative leave, coercing them to resign. These possibilities are what every Treasury expert I’ve talked to instantly thought of the moment they read the Washington Post reporting and are incredibly alarmed about.
Lambert here: I haven’t encountered a list of Bureau of Fiscal Service Systems, so I take the liberty of including the following systems here, and tagging this post with them under “Databases and Systems (Government)”. The list might not be exhaustive:
- Automated Standard Application for Payments
- Electronic Federal Tax Payment System
- Secure Payment System
- Treasury Check Information System
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