DOGE Gains Access to Treasury Payment Systems, Top Bureaucrat Resigns
The White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has finally gained access to the U.S. government’s payment system after a career bureaucrat had blocked them out. In an executive order creating DOGE, President Donald Trump ordered all agencies to provide the small but energetic team, headed by Elon Musk, with “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” for the purpose of identifying and exposing areas of government waste, which can later be cut.
A single payment system within the U.S. Treasury Department is effectively the spigot for every dollar Uncle Sam spends, and for decades access to it has remained closely held among career officials in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service. Since the election, agents of DOGE have requested access to this system, and they renewed their requests after Trump’s executive order made their department official.
Yet through the first week of the Trump administration, Acting Treasury Secretary David Lebryk denied DOGE access to the payment system. Last Monday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Trump’s nominee, received Senate confirmation, and Trump administration officials placed Lebryk on administrative leave.
On Friday, Lebryk announced his retirement in a letter to Treasury employees — rather a high-flying move for a civil servant. The letter addressed the Fiscal Service without addressing the controversy directly. “The Fiscal Service performs some of the most vital functions in government,” he said. “Our work may be unknown to most of the public, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t exceptionally important.”
This could simply be encouraging comments, or it could be a subtle call to further resistance against impending changes by the Trump administration. The latter would be both inappropriate and unwelcome.
“America has a new CEO, President Trump,” Family Research Council Senior Fellow Meg Kilgannon, who served the previous Trump administration at the Department of Education, told The Washington Stand. “Any new executive wants to see basic accounting functions like payables and receivables.”
“The fact that there are people in the government, paid by taxpayers, who think the President of the United States or his designee cannot see who is being paid by the federal government is a scandal of the highest order,” Kilgannon added. “Expect resignations and firings until this situation is corrected. We have a right and a duty to know where federal dollars are flowing.”
Meanwhile, the mainstream media is not enamored by the thought of public accountability for public spending; their reporting attempts to make the access by DOGE appear sinister. The Washington Post headline, for instance, relabels DOGE as “Musk allies” — because some people think everything associated with right-wing billionaires must be evil — without mentioning that DOGE is a part of the Trump administration. “Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government,” the article exclaims. Actually, President Trump wants to control the executive branch, but that sounds far less sinister.
The Washington Post also implied a sinister motive to the desire to gain access. “It is unclear precisely why Musk’s team sought access to those systems. But both Musk and the Trump administration more broadly have sought to control spending in ways that far exceed efforts by their predecessors and have alarmed legal experts.” Earlier in the same article, the Post provided the reason: “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.” The path to cutting spending begins with identifying what spending there is to cut.
A different allegation came from ABC News, which hypothesized what would happen “if Musk or his team were to attempt to block these payments.” A letter from Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), mongered fear about “politically-motivated meddling” in the payment systems. In other words, Democrats are afraid that the Trump administration might weaponize the Treasury Department by canceling legitimate payments to political opponents as they weaponized the Justice Department, the IRS, and other government agencies.
This is at least a valid concern, but one which needs proof. For now, the stated purpose of DOGE is to audit the government for waste, so that the elected agents of the people can actually control the government that governs in the people’s name. The team is too small and moving too fast to pull illegitimate shenanigans along the way.
But Mark Mazur, a former Treasury official under the Obama and Biden administrations (that is, a political appointee), complained that the audit was not necessary. “This is a mechanical job — they pay Social Security benefits, they pay vendors, whatever. It’s not one where there’s a role for nonmechanical things, at least from the career standpoint. Your whole job is to pay the bills as they’re due,” he said. “It’s never been used in a way to execute a partisan agenda. … You have to really put bad intentions in place for that to be the case.”
But even mechanical jobs need oversight because machines can malfunction, too. Musk reported on Saturday, “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. Not even once.”
To career employees, this smooth operation is evidence that the machine is working as intended. But machines can be more discerning (e.g. a cast saw, or a paper shredder), and the American people deserve a more discerning payment, too.
Over at CBS News, reporters complained that Musk “did not provide proof of this claim.” Such comments merely prove that DOGE can do nothing right for the mainstream media; they complain when it gets access to a sensitive financial system, and they complain when they don’t immediately share details from that system in a tweet. Surely DOGE will provide the proper information to the proper parties within the White House and Congress to address any abuses they find. The mainstream media is definitely not the proper party.
“In the first Trump administration, federal employees conspired openly to stymie the president’s agenda. After last fall’s election, some of them spoke to the media anonymously, promising obstruction,” Family Research Council Senior Fellow for Regulatory Affairs Chris Gacek told The Washington Stand. “But this administration arrived ready this time, and over a couple of days shut down one agency and grabbed the keys to the government’s financial payment system, leading to the resignation of a top Treasury Department official who had served under three presidents and the placement of two Treasury security personnel on leave.”
“More will come out,” Gacek continued, “but two things are clear: Trump was watching how Elon Musk took over Twitter, and there will be no #resistance in the federal workforce.”
Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.