The Trump administration pushed out a top Treasury Department official this week after he refused to give Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team access to the government’s vast payment system, part of a bid by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to choke off federal funding.
David Lebryk, a career civil servant who oversaw the more than one billion payments that the federal government makes every year, was placed on administrative leave this week after resisting requests from Mr. Musk’s lieutenants, according to people familiar with the circumstances, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal dynamics.
Mr. Lebryk’s abrupt departure raises questions about whether Mr. Musk will now gain control of the payment system — and, if so, how he could use it. His exit also underscores the extraordinary amount of power that Mr. Musk, whose current employment status inside the federal government remains unclear, is accumulating at the opening of the second Trump administration.
Mr. Musk, a billionaire, has dispatched aides across the bureaucracy to try to radically reduce spending. He has told Trump administration officials that he aims to take control of the Treasury computers used to complete payments in order to identify fraud and abuse, according to three people familiar with his remarks.
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