Department of government efficiency | The Musk agency takes control of the Treasury Payment Systems

What agency is it?
Citing confidential sources, several media, including The New York Times And ABC, claim that the new Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, has personally authorized employees of the Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, to access the IT systems of the Bureau of the Tax Service. This little -known agency under the Treasury Department distributed, in 2023, just over 5.4 Billions in payments to the beneficiaries of the Social Security and Medicaid program, as well as in tax reimbursements and payments to companies doing business with the state.
How is it worrying?
An agency official, who refused to grant access to this system to the DOGE since it is not an official governmental organization that can access secret information, was dismissed on Friday. He then retired.
“I am very concerned about the possibility that Elon Musk and other unknown people of Doge seek to obtain access and to control the payment systems of the tax service in order to carry out a political program which would clearly violate the law,” wrote the Democratic senator and member of the Ron Wyden Senate of Finance Committee, in a letter sent to the Secretary of the Treasury on Friday. Mr. Wyden requests the name of all those who have had access to the payment system, and what are the prior security checks that have been made about them.
Fearing that particularly secret information could have been stolen, he also asked if “a verification of conflicts of potential interests posed by the numerous operations carried out by Elon Musk in China” was made. Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, member of the Senate banking committee, also described the situation as “extremely dangerous” in a letter to Mr. Bessent.
PHOTO BEN CURTIS, ARCHIVES ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Democratic Senator of Oregon Ron Wyden
What do we know about DOGE employees?
The Magazine Wiredwhich has been investigating for several days on the takeover of government organizations by the Doge d’Elon Musk, says that a small group of six young men aged 19 to 24, closely linked to Mr. Musk companies, play leading roles in the operation. One of them, who would do the work on a voluntary basis, is a computer scientist who briefly attended the benches of McGill University, where he worked on a project to create a governance system for business using channel technology of blocks (blockchain), according to our information. Two other young men mentioned by Wired would have links with Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir, a company specializing in the analysis of massive databases used, among other things, by police services.
How did Elon Musk react?
The publication of the names of these six people made a lot of noise on social networks. Elon Musk notably disabled the account of a user who published the name of the six individuals, accusing him of having “committed a crime”. He also said on X, without providing proof that the DOGE discovered that the Treasury employees had the investigation of “always approving all payments, whether fraudulent or intended for terrorists”.