A few weeks before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, members of his transition team went to the Treasury Department to talk about the handover of power.
But what is normally a routine discussion turned into an alarming series of interactions for a handful of top career Treasury officials.
Trump’s team, which included members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, peppered Treasury officials about one of the department’s most sensitive and critical functions: processing trillions of dollars in government payments a year.
Through a series of specific requests, Trump’s landing team attempted to lift the hood on the department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, an arcane branch that distributes nearly 90 percent of all federal payments, including Social Security benefits, tax refunds and payments to federal workers and contractors. That adds up to a billion annual transactions totaling more than $5 trillion.
A month later, this obscure Treasury office is now a key battlefront in a wider war being waged by Trump and his allies over federal spending. Signs of the fight emerged this week.
According to one person familiar with the department, Trump-affiliated employees had previously asked about Treasury’s ability to stop payments. But Lebryk’s pushback was, “We don’t do that,” the person said.
“They seem to want Treasury to be the chokepoint on payments, and that’s unprecedented,” the person added, emphasizing that it is not the bureau’s role to decide which payments to make — it is “just to make the f-ing payments.”
Before Trump’s inauguration, members of his transition landing team wanted to know granular details about the bureau’s proprietary computer systems, including “each step in the disbursement process.” They also wanted to visit field offices where government workers, in Philadelphia or Kansas, work on computers that disburse payments.
The requests puzzled many career officials initially. The transition operation hadn’t requested substantive briefings on any of Treasury’s other critical areas of operation, multiple people familiar with the matter said. Veterans of past transition efforts, representing presidents of both parties, couldn’t recall precedent for the Trump team’s entreaty.
The arcane process of cutting the government’s checks is normally overlooked by political leadership, though the incoming administration exhibited an odd interest in its inner workings, sources said — raising suspicions among career officials about the intent to tinker with a crucial financial pipeline that keeps the nation’s economy running.\
DOGE officials, in the lead up to Bessent’s decision to sign-off on their access, had been operating from the position that Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order establishing their agency had already authorized their access. That order, in part, directs the heads of federal agencies to take “all necessary steps” within the law to ensure Musk’s group has “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.”
Lambert here: I have not read a source that urges that DOGE is not correct about the scope of EO 14158. That leaves the Norms Fairy, I guess. And the courts, of course.
Some of the members of Trump’s landing team present for the initial transition meetings are now working at the Treasury Department.
Among them is Baris Akis, a Musk ally who is the co-founder of a venture capital firm, Human Capital. Akis’ presence raised alarms among some of the Treasury officials present for those early meetings, since he was not an official member of the incoming Trump administration and didn’t have a security clearance at the time, the sources told CNN.
Akis, along with a few others affiliated with Musk’s DOGE, has been in the Treasury building in recent days. Sources familiar with the department tell CNN they “rove around as a pack” — emphasizing how the group is working in the building in a way that is separate from the rest of the department’s staff.
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