How much access does DOGE have?
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday the DOGE team was not “tinkering” with the system.
“There is no tinkering with the system. They are on read-only,” he said. “They are looking. They can make no changes. It is an operation program to suggest improvements.”
“They have no ability to change the system. I have no ability to grant that change,” he added.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday that DOGE engineers were not allowed to write new code for payment systems.
What’s the purpose of the access?
“The Bureau of Fiscal Service isn’t a policy job with political appointees. It is totally mechanical: agencies tell the Bureau who gets tax credits, who gets grants, which contractors to pay — and they get the money out,” said Natasha Sarin, a professor at Yale Law School and a former Biden Treasury Department official.
Sarin said she couldn’t think of a legitimate reason that political appointees would want to gain access to the payment system, and that it amounted to short-circuiting the pathway of intended Treasury operations.
Journalist and economic researcher Nathan Tankus told The Hill that DOGE staff may be targeting another platform known as the Automated Standard Application for Payments (ASAP), which is used in part to pay non-profit organizations.
“ASAP is the system that you would use if you wanted to target specific government agencies in the grants and other disbursements that they make and if you also wanted especially to target disfavored nonprofits,” he said.
Is your personal data safe?
Even with read-only access, DOGE officials have access to Americans’ core financial information, including Social Security numbers.
“We are talking about the Social Security numbers and private information about every single American,” Sarin said.
Is it legal to gain access like this?
A White House spokesperson told The Hill that DOGE efforts are being undertaken in compliance with federal law by people with appropriate security clearances, whom they described as employees of the relevant agencies, as opposed to outside advisors.
What’s at stake for global payments?
Like a lot of government computer code, much of the Fiscal Service payment system is written in COBOL, a legacy programming language that’s not compatible with a lot of more modern software.
Some of it is even written in Assembly language, an even more basic type of computer code that corresponds with binary, on-off instructions of machine code.
Experts described these systems as quite fragile and easy to screw up.
Add new comment