Greg Sargent writes:

President Donald Trump has granted Elon Musk unprecedented power to carry out his war on the “deep state.” The justification for this is supposed to be that the government is corrupted to its core precisely because it is stocked with unelected bureaucrats who are unaccountable to the people.

Musk, goes this story, will employ his fearsome tech wizardry to root them out, restoring not just efficiency to government but also the democratic accountability that “deep state” denizens have snuffed out—supposedly a major cause of many of our social ills.

The startling news that a top Treasury Department official is departing after a dispute with Musk shows how deeply wrong that story truly is—and why it’s actively dangerous. The Washington Post reports that David Lebryk, who has carried out senior nonpolitical roles at the department for decades, is leaving after officials on Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, sought access to Treasury’s payment system:

Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.

The news raises a complicated question: WTF??? Why is Musk’s DOGE trying to access payment systems inside the Treasury Department? It’s not clear what relevance this would have to his ostensible role, which is to search for savings and inefficiencies in government, not to directly influence whether previously authorized government obligations are honored.

Another question: Did Trump directly authorize Musk to do this, or did he not? Either answer is bad. If Trump did, he may be authorizing an unelected billionaire to exert unprecedented control over the internal workings of government payment systems. If he did not, then Musk may be going rogue to an even greater extent than we thought.

I contacted a few former officials at the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, to try to gauge what this means. What was striking is the level of alarm they evinced about it. Here’s how the Post describes these systems:

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. 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. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.

Former officials I spoke with were at a loss to explain why Musk would want such access. They noted that while we don’t yet know Musk’s motive, the move could potentially give DOGE the power to turn off all kinds of government payments in a targeted way. They said we now must establish if Musk is seeking to carry out what Trump tried via his federal funding freeze: Turn off government payments previously authorized by Congress. The White House rescinded the freeze after a national outcry, but Trump’s spokesperson vowed the hunt for spending to halt will continue. The former officials are asking: Is this Treasury power grab a way to execute that? [Continue reading…]