‘Filled With Unmitigated Terror’

Dayen interviews Tankus.

A handful of nonpartisan civil servants have worked to perfect the government’s payment plumbing and ensure that 1.4 billion payments a year, worth about $5.5 trillion, are delivered flawlessly and on time. Now, Silicon Valley expats in their early twenties are poring over the code, trying to reorient it into something that can withhold payments Musk deems illegal based on random Twitter posts. And that’s if the system doesn’t just melt down over the removal of fail-safe elements or the imposition of errant code.

So let’s say you’re right and they get full access, and the ability to make changes. How granular could that get? I’ve seen a lot of speculation about, oh these people have access to my Social Security number, he can withhold my Social Security payment. Are we really talking about disapproval of payments at the individual level, or would it have to be broader categories?

They are nowhere close to the ability to block individual payments at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service level.

Lambert here: Good news (at least in 2025).

I’ve seen people speculate that it’s already happening, but it’s very hard to see what’s going on. Musk bloviates a lot, and they are concurrently infiltrating the agencies. The slow-motion trench warfare is happening and they have had successes on that front, like with USAID. What happens when they get an agency to bend to their will and control an agency, they could shut off payments at that source. With legacy IT systems, it’s impossible that they’ve gained any capabilities, at least yet. Even if people are putatively complying with DOGE and that, they are not eager, to say the least, for this stuff to happen. I don’t think worrying about individual payments is on the track for the near future.

Lambert here: Sounds like a job for Palantir!

That being said, they can potentially be at the point, depending on how much more authority they get at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, to cut off the payments of an agency.

And so if it’s merely an intermediary, if there was a desire to reduce fraud in government payments, would the Treasury Bureau of the Fiscal Service be a logical location for that?

Absolutely not. You could build another system that could be a check in the validation of payments. The Bureau of the Fiscal Service plays some role in that. It has a do-not-pay [sSic. “Do Not Pay” (DNP)] system. Before a payment gets final validation, it gets cross-checked to a list of do-not-pay. That’s already part of the process. All of these processes can be improved. But the issue of improper payments, we’re not talking about fraudulent payments but improper payments, is about greater internal control at the agency levels. It’s about doing a better job of matching bank accounts, matching death registries. This is something that the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has been focused on. They make proposals around these sorts of issues. And these proposals don’t get funded.

I think it’s right to not assume perfect competency. So from an information technology standpoint, how easily could we tip from a flawless flow of payments into something broken?

I think the operational risks, they’re so multi-varied, even trying to come up with an answer of how many, it’s like where do you start…. [T]here are systems that are run in parallel between older and newer versions to make sure the same answers are coming out. We’re talking about systems where for years, both systems have been putting out correct data but not shutting down one because of edge cases where the data could be different. Only after years of work, they’ll shut down the older system. When you’re running old and new systems in tandem, you’re incurring both costs. My central terror, although there are a million ones you can pick, is that based on Musk’s history, the redundancies which are the premise of mission-critical IT systems, the premise that this must never fail, he’s going to look at it and say look at this inefficiency. A mission-critical system has to be inefficient because that’s how you make sure it functions all the time. The difference between 97 percent and 100 percent functioning is crucial. It may be inefficiency, but it means making sure that 88 percent of the federal government’s payments are going out all the time reliably.