Nathan Tankus is the research director of the Modern Money online grid.
His billionaire donorElon Musks attempts togain access to the Treasury Departments payment systemsis inconceivably more dangerous.
Per CNN, Musks team was specifically inquiring about the technical ability to stop payments.
President Donald Trump (left) and Elon Musk (right) on Nov. 19, 2024, in Brownsville, Texas.Brandon Bell/Getty Images
His understanding of the operational systems that undergird the functioning of the U.S. Treasury is unparalleled.
The danger is also not in the near future it is here now.
However, the point of read only access is to make changes through understanding the code.
There is no reason to think at this moment that Bessent would resist any of DOGEs proposed modifications.
Until new information emerges, the best sign of whats going on is Lebryk being forced out.
This is not the attitude of people who are simply trying to make the payment system more efficient.
They literally never denied a payment in their entire career.
Note that these arelegislative proposals, because these require statutory authorization and cannot legally be done unilaterally.
They would also cost money to enact, which requires appropriations.
This is 88 percent of the total payments the federal government makes.
The Bureau of the Fiscal Service is the pulsating payments heart of the entire federal government.
They are helped in this effort by court injunctions they can point to.
They can just impound agency payments themselves.
The central reason is privacy.
Social Security payments, among many others, flow throughthe Treasurys Secured Payment System.
Musk messing with ASAP is no hypothetical at all.
Its hard to get good information on the exact state of play of the Treasury payments systems IT modernization.
Assembly was a coding language invented in 1947, prior to the ubiquitous outdated mainframe coding language COBOL.
This has been and remains an enormous and under-budgeted task.
Does Elon Musk understand any of this?
Does he have any grasp of the scale and complexity he is trying to reach into?
Musk has never shown much respect for the concept of a mission-critical IT system.
Twitter failing would not be a crisis for the world.
Musk and DOGEs efforts to take over the Bureau of the Fiscal Service is as dangerous as it gets.
