President Donald Trump’s new Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has given Tesla CEO Elon Musk full access to the federal payment system late Friday. This gives Musk a powerful tool to monitor and possibly limit government spending.
This comes after an incident last week when a top Treasury official resisted giving officials with Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency access to the system. According to The New York Times, the system sends money on behalf of the entire federal government.
The official, David Lebryk, was a career civil servant. The department put him on leave after the incident before he retired on Friday, according to The Times.
Why does Musk want access to the system?
Some experts say that taking control of this system could allow the Trump administration another way to restrict the disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress. Musk has recently criticized the Treasury Department in a social media post.
“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,” Musk said in the post. “They literally never denied a payment in their entire career. Not even once.”
At this time, it’s not clear if Musk or DOGE has blocked any payments since gaining access to the system.
Besides granting payments, the system also includes critical and sensitive data about the millions of Americans who receive Social Security benefits.
Have there been issues with federal payments?
Improper payments in federal programs have long been an issue that has drawn the attention of government watchdogs and congressional lawmakers. Improper payments spiked in recent years when the government approved large relief programs to help during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Politico.
The Government Accountability Office estimated that the government could be losing up to $521 billion each year due to fraud. Federal agencies reported $236 billion in improper payments in the 2024 fiscal year. According to Politico, the majority of the improper payments came from Medicare, Medicaid and unemployment insurance.
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