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.
“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 Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative economic policy group and a former Senate senior economic policy advisor.
Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, is an unpaid advisor to President Donald Trump. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has been tasked with finding ways to cut spending and regulations.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., 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 that Musk’s DOGE operatives were at Treasury, going through the payment systems and that they had effectively ousted the top civil servant at the Treasury Department, David Lebryk, after he refused to grant access to Musk’s emissaries.
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 non-political staff, handles trillions of dollars annually, including Social Security and Medicare benefits and tax credits.
Wyden said his staff found out about the events on Friday and independently confirmed them through whistleblowers and internal sources.
By Monday, the Senate staffers had concluded that the DOGE workers spent the weekend accessing the Treasury Department’s massive federal payment system, Wyden said, including “the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans, bank accounts and tax data, Social Security numbers and home addresses.”
“We got on it, and what is clear now is that unqualified and unaccountable people 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.
March 21, 2024; Washington, DC, ; Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, during Janet Yellen, Secretary of the United States Department of the Treasury, giving testimony at the Senate Financial Committee hearings to examine the President’s proposed budget request for fiscal year 2025. Mandatory Credit: Jack Gruber-USA TODAY
‘Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour,’ Musk says
Musk appeared to condone the activities of DOGE personnel working at Treasury in a Feb. 2 post on X, the social media platform he owns.
“Career Treasury officials 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 needs to stop NOW!”
Musk later posted information about some of the DOGE personnel at Treasury, and others going through similar databases at the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM. He said they have degrees from Stanford, UC Berkeley, & MIT and work experience at Google, Tesla and SpaceX, all companies he owns.
“Time to confess: Media reports saying that @DOGE has some of world’s best software engineers are in fact true,” Musk wrote in a Monday afternoon @X post.
Musk also defended his team’s actions at Treasury by saying, “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 that Musk’s comment suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of how the process works. The system, he said on the condition of anonymity, is basically the U.S. government’s checkbook for payments already approved by Congress. To find waste, fraud and abuse, the staffer said, Musk would need to go to the agencies that are actually spending the money.
The White House did not return an email seeking comment. But on Monday in the Oval Office, Trump told reporters he agrees with the steps Musk has taken “for the most part.”
“Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval, and we’ll give him the approval where appropriate. Where it’s not appropriate we won’t,” Trump said. “But he reports in and he, it’s something that he feels very strongly about, and I’m impressed because he’s running, obviously, a big company.”
On @X, Musk also said that, 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.”
Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk addresses a stadium audience in Washington, D.C., on the Inauguration Day of Donald Trump’s second presidential term.
An extraordinary breach by the ‘Musk hatchet brigade’
Wyden said the breach poses an extraordinary and unprecedented threat to U.S. 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 spy 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 identifications − and photos − of some of them deployed to the Treasury, OPM and elsewhere. WIRED magazine reported that the young men were engineers between 19 and 24 years old, most linked to Musk’s companies, with one purportedly still in college.
Wyden and others interviewed by USA TODAY Monday said the DOGE staffers had not been given congressionally authorized jobs, hadn’t passed the required background checks or obtained security clearances needed to access at least some of the material.
Wyden said he was especially concerned about the fact that the Treasury data – and personnel data at OPM – contain highly sensitive information about government workers and programs and payments to government contractors, including those that compete with Musk-owned companies for billions of dollars in government contracts.
What’s more, Wyden said, Musk’s vast business interests in China, including a factory that builds many of his Tesla electric vehicles, could cause even more problems.
Faced with mounting outrage among Democrats, Wyden and other senators held a news conference Monday afternoon where they called on Republicans to join them in fighting for Musk’s DOGE personnel to relinquish the reins of the Treasury payment system.
If Bessent doesn’t revoke DOGE’s access, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. said, Democrats will introduce legislation to “stop unlawful meddling in the Treasury Department’s payment systems.”
Both Wyden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., also sent separate letters to Bessent over the weekend demanding answers.
Wyden’s letter posed several questions to the Treasury Department, including whether officials linked to Musk or DOGE have requested or been granted access to Treasury’s payment systems, and if they have, under what legal authority and for what purpose. The senator also inquired about any vetting processes conducted by the Treasury Department regarding potential conflicts of interest due to Musk’s business operations in China.
“The press has previously reported that Musk was denied a high-level clearance to access the government’s most sensitive secrets,” Wyden wrote in his letter to Bessent. “I am concerned that Musk’s enormous business operation in China … endangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk.”
Warren told Bessent she was “alarmed by reports” of the “extraordinarily dangerous” DOGE takeover at Treasury, including allowing Lebryk – who was acting Treasury secretary before Bessent’s confirmation – to be pushed aside. Lebryk, Warren noted, is “the key official responsible for managing the extraordinary measures the Department of the Treasury is taking to avoid a default on U.S. debt.”
Thus his sidelining, “risking missteps that could result in a global financial meltdown that costs trillions of dollars and millions of jobs,” Warren wrote.
Most congressional Republicans have not yet commented on the issue, but in response to Warren’s complaints, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, replied on @X, “I disagree with your characterization of the facts. Other than that, this is exactly what we voted for. Who’s with me on this?”
‘Seizing critical systems’ and ‘rooting through them’
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a legal and constitutional watchdog group, was marshaling legal resources to fight DOGE’s accessing of the Treasury and OPM systems on Monday.
“We haven’t made any decisions yet, but we’re looking at many pieces of this, and what the legal implications are,” John Davisson, EPIC’s director of litigation, told USA TODAY.
“This is an extremely irregular, unprecedented act of seizing critical systems 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 safe keeping, 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,” Davisson said.
Former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois called on congressional lawmakers to go to Treasury headquarters around the corner from the White House and find out 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.”
Later Monday, two major federal employee unions filed seeking to block DOGE access to 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, AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union, AFL-CIO, said. “Secretary Bessent’s action granting DOGE-affiliated individuals full, continuous, and ongoing access to that information … means that retirees, taxpayers, federal employees, companies, and other individuals from all walks of life have no assurance that their information will receive the protection that federal law affords.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Dems push back at Elon Musk for DOGE takeover at Treasury
