Just one week ago, Elon Musk and the DOGE team began investigating the U.S. Treasury Department’s payment systems. This probe into the Treasury’s payment systems proved to be too much for at least one longtime official.
David Lebryk, the top-ranking career U.S. Treasury Department official, announced at the time that he would leave his post, where he had served as a top official for years. Lebryk clashed with Musk over access to a “sensitive system” used to pay over $6 trillion annually in Social Security and Medicare benefits. The results of the DOGE audit did not bode well for Lebryk and other career officials at the Treasury.
According to Elon Musk, during his investigation, his team discovered that payment approval officers were instructed to ALWAYS approve payments, even to fraudulent groups or terrorist organizations.
“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,” Musk wrote.
This revelation horrified Democrat elites across the country. On Saturday, Obama appointee Judge Paul A. Engelmayer halted Elon Musk’s government efficiency team from accessing a critical Treasury Department system. The order by this judge prevented Musk and DOGE from accessing a sensitive payment system responsible for distributing Americans’ tax returns, Social Security benefits, disability payments, and federal employees’ salaries.
Despite this setback, Elon Musk and DOGE released their guidelines on Saturday to improve the Treasury and save the American people millions or even billions from fraudulent actors or terrorist organizations.
Here are the agreed-upon items between DOGE and the Treasury:
– Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary to pass financial audits. This field is frequently left blank, making audits nearly impossible.
– All payments must include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, no judgment is being applied to this rationale yet, but simply requiring SOME attempt to explain the payment is better than NOTHING.
– The DO-NOT-PAY list of entities known to be fraudulent, deceased, probable fronts for terrorist organizations, or mismatched with Congressional appropriations must be implemented and not ignored. Currently, it can take up to a year to add entities to this list, which is far too long. This list should be updated at least weekly, if not daily.
These super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees, not anyone from DOGE. It is ridiculous that these changes didn’t already exist!
Musk also revealed, “Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100 billion per year in entitlement payments to individuals with no Social Security Number (SSN) or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious. When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50 billion per year or $1 billion per week!! This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately.”
To be clear, what the @DOGE team and @USTreasury have jointly agreed makes sense is the following:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 8, 2025
– Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making…
