Elon Musk’s team gains access to Treasury Department’s payments system

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency full access to the federal payment system late Friday, according to three people familiar with the change, handing Elon Musk and the team he is leading a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.

The new authority follows a standoff this past week with a top Treasury official who had resisted allowing Musk’s lieutenants into the department’s payment system, which sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government. The official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, was put on leave and then suddenly retired Friday after the dispute, according to people familiar with his exit.

The system could give the Trump administration another mechanism to attempt to unilaterally restrict disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress, a push that has faced legal roadblocks.

Musk, who has been given wide latitude by President Donald Trump to find ways to slash government spending, has recently fixated on Treasury’s payment processes, criticizing the department in a social media post Saturday for not rejecting more payments as fraudulent or improper.

It is not clear whether the team led by Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, has blocked any payments since gaining access to the system.

The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is not a government department, but a team within the administration.

It was put together at Trump’s direction by Musk to fan out across federal agencies seeking ways to cut spending, reduce the size of the federal workforce and bring more efficiency to the bureaucracy. Most of those working on the initiative were recruited by Musk and his aides.

Similar DOGE teams have begun demanding access to data and systems at other federal agencies, but none of those agencies controls the flow of money in the way the Treasury Department does.

Bessent granted access to the payments system to a handful of staff members affiliated with DOGE, including Tom Krause, the CEO of a Silicon Valley company, Cloud Software Group, according to one of the people familiar with the change. Access to the system has historically been closely held because it includes sensitive personal information about the millions of Americans who receive Social Security checks, tax refunds and other payments from the federal government.

Representatives for the Treasury Department, DOGE and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In a process typically run by civil servants, the Treasury Department carries out payments submitted by agencies across the government, disbursing more than $5 trillion in fiscal year 2023.

Former officials said the onus was on individual agencies to ensure their payments are proper, not the relatively small staff at the Treasury Department, which is responsible for making more than 1 billion payments per year.

Lebryk had resisted requests from members of Trump’s transition team for access to the data last month. After Trump took office, the White House indicated that he should be removed from the job and, according to a person familiar with the matter, Bessent suggested putting him on leave.

Democrats raised alarm this past week that the Trump administration and Bessent, who was just confirmed by the Senate on Monday, were compromising the federal government’s payments system.

“To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy,” Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote in a letter to Bessent on Friday. “I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.”

Wyden followed up on Saturday to express concern that access to the payment system had already been granted and pointed to Musk’s potential conflicts of interest.

“Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk’s own companies. All of it,” he wrote on social media.

During the transition, Musk vocally opposed Bessent being picked as Trump’s Treasury secretary. Musk, then just an empowered adviser to Trump, went public with his opinion that he preferred Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street executive, for the role because Bessent was “a business-as-usual choice.” Lutnick became Trump’s choice for Commerce secretary.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.