Fight brewing over Treasury takeover
Breach by Musk team being likened to a coup
By: Josh Meyer
USA Today
WASHINGTON - Democratic lawmakers and government watchdog groups are pledging to fight back against Elon Musk's takeover of the federal government's payment system, which they say may be the biggest privacy and security breach in American history.
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"If we were watching this happen in Venezuela or Malawi and we saw a billionaire seize the money supply and the checkbook of the government, we would call it a coup,: said Lindsy Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative economic policy group and a former Senate senior economic policy adviser.
..... Musk, the world's wealthiest person, is an unpaid adviser to President Donald Trump. Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has been tasked with finding ways to cut spending and regulations.
..... Senator Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, in an exclusive interview with USA Today, said that Musk sent young DOGE computer programmers into the Treasury Department's headquarters, where they allegedly strong-armed civil service workers to gain full access to the system that cuts checks for all congressionally authorized government payments.
..... Reports emerged over the weekend [02-01-02/2025] that Musk's DOGE
operative were at Treasury, going through the payment systems, and that they had effectively ousted the top civil servant at the Treasury Department to grant access to them.
..... And they ultimately pressured Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to "turn the keys over" to them, said Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.
..... The payment system, traditionally managed by career civil servants and nonpolitical staff, handles trillions of dollars annually, including Social Security and Medicare benefits and tax credits.
..... Wyden said his staff independently confirmed the events through whistle-blowers and internal sources.
..... By Monday, [02/03/2025] the Senate staffers had concluded the DOGE workers spent the weekend [02/01-02/2025] accessing the Treasury Department's massive feudal payment system, Wyden said, including "the personal information of hundreds of million of Americans, bank accounts and tax data. Social Security numbers and home addresses."
..... "What is clear now is that unqualified and unaccountable pole have seized control of the flow of taxpayer funds and a trove of very sensitive data, and they are seizing the tools they need for a coup," Wyden said.
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Musk appeared to condone the activities of DOGE personnel working at Treasury platform he owns.
..... "Career Treasury classified are breaking the law every hour of every day by approving payments that are fraudulent or do not match the funding laws passed by Congress," Musk posted "This need to stop NOW!"
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Musk also stated: "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."
..... A Democratic staff official on the Senate Finance Committee told USA Today on Monday [02/03/2025] that Musk's comment suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of how the process works. They system, he said on the condition of anonymity, is basically the U.S. government's checkbook of repayments already approved by Congress. To find waste, fraud and abuse, the staffer said, Musk would need to go to the agencies that are actually speeding the money.
..... The White House did not return an email seeking comment.
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Wyden said the breach poses an extraordinary, unprecedented threat to national security given the nature of the information contained in the treasury system that is now in the hands of Musk's staffers. "The Musk hatchet brigade has infiltrated a gold mine of data that every foreign and corrupt actor would love to see," Wyden said. "It is a prescription for nightmares."
..... After news broke that Musk's DOGE crew was at the Treasury Department, some journalists and open source investigators posted identification - and photos- of some of them deployed to the Treasury. Office of Personnel Management and elsewhere WIRED magazine reported hat the young men were engineers between 19 and 24 years and most linked to Musk's companies, with one purportedly still in college.
..... Wyden and others interviewed by USA Today Monday [02/03/2025] said the DOGE staffers had not been given congressionally authorized jobs and hadn't passed the required background checks or obtained security clearance needed to access at least some of the material.
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The electronic Privacy Information Center, a legal and constitutional watchdog group, was marshaling legal resources to fight DOGE's accessing of the Treasury and OPM systems on Monday. [02/03/2025] "We haven't, made any decisions yet, but we're looking at many pieces of this, and what the legal implications are," John Davidson, EPIC's director of litigation told USA Today.
..... "This is an extremely irregular, unprecedented act of seizing critical system and handing it over to people who, to a certainty, lack the training or have no prior familiarity with systems, are not charged with their safekeeping, and are really just rooting through them, identifying data points and combining data sets, it appears, for their own ends of dismantling the federal government," Davisison said.
..... Later Monday, [02/03/2025]
tow major federal employee unions field a lawsuit seeking to block DOGE access to the Treasury Department payment database. "The scale of the intrusion into individuals' privacy is massive and unprecedented," the lawsuit by the American Federation of Government Employees and the AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union said.
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Former Representative Adam Kinzinger, R-Illinois, called on congressional lawmakers to go to Treasury headquarters around the corner for themselves what, exactly, is going on inside.
..... "Send members of Congress to go into the building and investigate what these people are doing,: Kinzinger said in a video posted on X. "Dare them to stop you because they can't."