DOGE and Federal Payments

Yesterday I discussed how the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which I guess I should start referring to by its official name, the U.S. DOGE Service (USDS) — has been trying to take direct control of the federal workforce. Today I will look at Shadow President Elon Musk's use of DOGE to take control of another part of the government: its money.

As DOGE teams have swept into government departments, one of their first targets has been systems that control payments. When DOGE staffers entered the Treasury Department, they immediately sought access to the biggest target of them all: the U.S. Treasury's payment system that is responsible for 1 billion payments per year. This is a tightly controlled system due to the sensitive information contained within it. None of the DOGE personnel have undergone background checks, and at least one DOGE employee is known to have been fired by a previous employer due to leaking company secrets. Nevertheless, Musk's team forced Treasury employees to give them access. When David Lebryk, a 35-year veteran of the department who had briefly served as Acting Secretary, resisted DOGE's attempts to gain access to the payment system, he was placed on administrative leave. He later announced his retirement.

A group of 19 state attorneys general sued the Treasury Department to prohibit the DOGE team from accessing the payments system. The government at first contended that DOGE staffers were limited to read-only access to the system which would not allow them to modify payments. However, it was later revealed that one DOGE staffer had been provided full access that allowed him to make changes to the system's code. Josh Marshall, publisher of Talking Points Memo, has reported that 25-year-old Marko Elez, the staffer in question, had even been making changes to the code. Elez briefly resigned from DOGE after racist social media posts that he had authored came to light. In one, he wrote, "Normalize Indian hate". After Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance called for Elez's reinstatement, he was rehired and returned to the Treasury Department.

Musk has claimed that DOGE needs access to payment systems in order to audit them for waste, fraud, and abuse. However, the DOGE staffers are not auditors, and what they are doing is not auditing. In fact, what they are doing is not even very sophisticated. According to reports, the DOGE team simply conducts word searches looking for specific words or phrases. One such search has led to an incident which should be embarrassing for all involved, except that none of the personalities in question appear to be capable of shame. This example involved a claim first made by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt that the U.S. had allocated $50 million for condoms for Gaza. This claim was repeated by cult leader, convicted felon, and failed President Donald Trump, who further claimed that the condoms were sent to Hamas, who used them to make bombs. Trump repeated the claim a second time but increased the amount to $100 million. What appears to have happened is that the DOGE staffers confused Gaza, Palestine, with the Gaza Province of Mozambique. Mozambique is not getting $50 million worth of condoms either, but it is getting funding as part of a U.S. Agency for International Aid program to combat HIV. However, that funding is far less than $50 million.

If DOGE is not conducting an audit, the question of just what they are doing remains. What does Musk hope to achieve with control of the payment systems? It is likely that he would like to uncover some waste or fraud. That is probably necessary for him to continue justifying DOGE's unhindered access to government resources. But there are more ominous possibilities. Money means control. As the saying goes, "he who pays the piper calls the tune." Musk may well want to call the government's tunes. Already, there are examples of DOGE staffers taking control of an agency's funding.

A closer look at how DOGE has taken over micromanaging funding was reported in the Washington Post. Journalist Matt Bai describes how Luke Farritor and Gavin Kliger, 23 and 25 years old, respectively, have taken control of the entire USAID funding and even overruled Secretary of State Marco Rubio:

Rubio had decreed that certain critical programs — such as aid to Ukraine and Syria and costs related to the PEPFAR program to combat HIV in Africa — would continue to be funded. Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency’s interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House.

But each time, using their new gatekeeping powers and clearly acting on orders from Musk or one of his lieutenants, Farritor and Kliger would veto the payments — a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online. Meanwhile, AIDS clinics shuttered and staff found themselves stranded in unstable countries like Congo.

Finally, on the second Saturday in February, the two IT guys from DOGE shut everyone else out of the payment system entirely. They were now the only people who could even see the payments waiting to be approved. Hardly any of the essential funding promised by Rubio had been processed as of last week.

Bai went on to write:

But if you step back for a moment, what’s happened at USAID over the past couple of weeks is unfathomable. A $50 billion agency — funded by taxpayers, empowered by Congress, and employing something like 11,000 people around the world — is now tightly controlled by a handful of 20-something software engineers who have never worked a day in government. They disregard promises from the American secretary of state while agonized policy experts stand by helplessly.

With control of the workforce and control of payments, Musk basically controls the government. No wonder that Trump spends so much time golfing now. There is almost nothing left for him to do. There is, of course, a question of whether Musk can maintain the control he has established. DOGE moved fast, and few were prepared to resist its takeover. Now, things are changing. Musk appears to have lost the battle over his "What did you do last week?" email, and DOGE's staff and funding cuts have become more and more difficult for elected Republicans to defend. Cabinet Secretaries will need to decide whether they are prepared to see their departments run by Musk and DOGE and whether they will allow themselves to be overruled by a group whose legal authority is in question. The next few weeks may reveal whether Musk's shadow government has staying power.