President Trump permitted Elon musk and his DOGE team the ability to not only look at the treasuries federal payment system but also to alter it. Government officials are displeased with this new development and are attempting to block Elon from continuious access to the treasury.
Last week the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signed off on the plan created by Trump’s organization to allow parts of Elons team DOGE to have access to the federal treasury. The team will be led by Tom Krause who is the CEO of Cloud Software Group and liaison of DOGE. “In order to allow him to perform this function, he has been hired as an expert/consultant by the federal government and designated in a role commonly used across Administrations—a “special government employee” —pursuant to applicable law,” stated Treasury official Jonathan Blum, regarding Krause.
Although Musk was allowed access to the treasury just last week, this has already been put on a temporary pause due to the lawsuits advocating that Trump doesn’t have the right to give other access to the U.S. Department of Treasury systems. “The President does not have the power to give away Americans’ private information to anyone he chooses, and he cannot cut federal payments approved by Congress,” said the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James.
A DOGE staff member named Marko Elez, who recently resigned due to racist online comments, briefly had the ability to edit the treasury payment database. This mistake was shown to the federal judges who are deciding if Elon Musk and his team should be able to access the treasury database. “To the best of our knowledge, Mr. Elez never knew of the fact that he briefly had read/write permissions for the database, and never took any action to exercise the ‘write’ privileges in order to modify anything within the SPS database,” stated Joseph Gioeli III, a deputy commissioner at Bureau of the Fiscal Service.
Several senate Democrats express discontent at the dangers involved in allowing Elon to access American people’s payments. Concerns such as using this information to get ahead in business, leaking private data, and if they even have the authority to do this are being brought to light. “An unelected unaccountable billionaire with expansive conflicts of interest, deep ties to China and an industry ax to grind against perceived enemies is hijacking our nation’s most sensitive financial systems and its checkbook,” said Democratic Senator Patty Murray, when questioned about the situation.
