Yesterday, the Acting Assistant Treasury Secretary Jonathan Blum sent a letter on behalf of the United States Treasury responding to Senator Wyden (with identical letters as well to other members of congress) regarding the Treasury Payments crisis. Among other claims and meaningless assurances, it states:
Currently, Treasury staff members working with Tom Krause, a Treasury employee, will have read-only access to the coded data of the Fiscal Service’s payment systems in order to continue this operational efficiency assessment. [Emphasis added]
I stand by my reporting and thus this is either a lie or a carefully worded evasion. Specifically, the statement could be worded to avoid confirming or denying that they also have write access. To explain what I mean, we must jump to the facts.
One source is aware of this letter and explicitly denied it late yesterday:
Treasury has been denying that they gave Marko write access, but I am looking at his access request right now and it has the Deputy Assistant Commissioner for IT Operations instructing the team to disregard all previous instructions and assign Marko read/write privileges for the database.
Thus, one way that this letter could be technically true in a bizarre and wildly dishonest sense is that by first having “read-only” access and then having “read and write” access, they could be said to have “read-only” and “read and write” access simultaneously.
But probably the United States Treasury is just lying.
Importantly, according to a source familiar with the situation, Krause does not have a Bureau of the Fiscal Service laptop or email yet. This source says, regarding the fact that the letter does not mention Marko Elez, states “That’s definitely a purposeful evasion.”
According to a source familiar with the situation a senior IT employee shared a schedule of blackouts (system outages, typically for maintenance which can include system code changes) for the Payment Automation Manager (PAM), International Treasury Services (ITS) & the Standard Application for Payments (ASAP) to Marko Elez. Recall that PAM is the primary way for the Treasury to send payments, having sent 4.7 trillion dollars last year.
As I reported in my piece on Monday, ASAP is the crucial mechanism that sends payments to “state and local governments, educational and financial institutions, vendors and contractors, profit and non-profit entities and Indian tribal organizations.” If you want to selectively impound spending, and particularly if you want to target specific non-profits or other disfavored entities (or agencies), this is a crucial system to get control of. Whether they can and how quickly is an extremely open question. Nor do we know that those blackouts were or will be for system changes. A source familiar with the situation has seen Marko involved with conversations about ASAP.
The other system, International Treasury Payments, is for all international payments. So if you want to target people or entities (crucially foreign non-profits and foreign countries, among many others) that the U.S. government disburses funds to, this is a system you would need to get a handle on. The desire to cut off foreign aid has been repeatedly stated by Trump on down, and if they can get operational control this system would be critical to doing that.
According to a source familiar with the situation, that same senior IT employee shared “technical documentation and guides” with Marko Elez which explain how to connect and operate a mainframe. It appears to be, though my source can’t confirm, the same one running PAM. According to a source familiar with the situation that makes it plausible that “DOGE” could obtain sufficient technical knowledge to implement some of its horrible ideas. That would likely be worse than outright breaking things, but it remains to be seen what they’re actually doing.
It’s important to understand that this source works in the IT operations department and thus is not one of the COBOL programmers working on these systems. I do not have insight into that, which is the main blindspot I’ve had in my current reporting.
This kind of information can also be used to target enemies and, if they get operational control elsewhere, the capability of using the Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC), & the Combating the Finance of Terror (CFT) laws to target political enemies. Of course, these laws have already been used to target political dissidents; but we are talking about something of an incomprehensibly larger scale. As one long time payments lawyer wrote to me: “Is DOGE using its own, non-OFAC definition of ‘terrorist group’ that has no basis in law?” In this sense, the Democratic party has fully and unequivocally participated in building the apparatus that is showing to be extraordinarily easily weaponized against them. In short, they can not just steal money but eliminate the financial existence of anyone they felt like, if operational control gets sufficient. The week Trump won his second term, I told a room full of Democratic party operatives that “if the Democratic Party really believed Trump was a fascist, they would destroy the servers containing all the surveillance data.”
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