For reasons I will go into below, I do believe that it is the case that Musk and his team are not yet near having “operational capabilities.” The key word is “yet.”…. They absolutely can shut down payments from a disfavored agency even if they can’t shut down “individual” payments operationally…..
Musk and his cronies are clearly aiming to redesign the payments system to serve their agenda. The most chilling sentence is this one from the Wall Street Journal:
It couldn’t be determined what DOGE representatives intended to do with their access to the payment system. Musk and his team think the payment system should be overseen by political appointees selected by President Trump, the people said.
This is not the attitude of people who are trying to simply technocratically make the payment system more “efficient.” They have a very clear and specific agenda, which involves unilaterally cutting spending, particularly spending they perceive to be going to their ideological foes. Is “Wokeness,” the “Green New Deal,” “Marxism,” and “Gender Ideology” going to be the new definition of an “improper payment”?
Which brings me back to the Constitutional Crisis.
Without political control of the payment’s heart, the Trump administration and Elon Musk must chase down every agency and bend it to their will. They are in the process of doing that, but bureaucrats can notionally continue to respect the law and resist their efforts. They are helped in this effort by court injunctions they can point to. This is bureaucratic trench warfare. But if Musk and Trump can reach into the choke point, the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, they could possibly not need agency cooperation. They can just impound agency payments themselves. They could also possibly stop paying federal employees they have forced on paid administrative leave, coercing them to resign. These possibilities are what every Treasury expert I’ve talked to instantly thought of the moment they read the Washington Post reporting and are incredibly alarmed about.
Lambert here: I haven’t encountered a list of Bureau of Fiscal Service Systems, so I take the liberty of including the following systems here, and tagging this post with them under “Databases and Systems (Government)”. The list might not be exhaustive:
- Automated Standard Application for Payments
- Electronic Federal Tax Payment System
- Secure Payment System
- Treasury Check Information System
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