President Donald Trump has granted Elon Musk unprecedented power to carry out his war on the “deep state.” The justification for this is supposed to be that the government is corrupted to its core precisely because it is stocked with unelected bureaucrats who are unaccountable to the people.
Musk, goes this story, will employ his fearsome tech wizardry to root them out, restoring not just efficiency to government but also the democratic accountability that “deep state” denizens have snuffed out—supposedly a major cause of many of our social ills.
The startling news that a top Treasury Department official is departing after a dispute with Musk shows how deeply wrong that story truly is—and why it’s actively dangerous. The Washington Post reports that David Lebryk, who has carried out senior nonpolitical roles at the department for decades, is leaving after officials on Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, sought access to Treasury’s payment system:
Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.
The news raises a complicated question: WTF??? Why is Musk’s DOGE trying to access payment systems inside the Treasury Department? It’s not clear what relevance this would have to his ostensible role, which is to search for savings and inefficiencies in government, not to directly influence whether previously authorized government obligations are honored.
Another question: Did Trump directly authorize Musk to do this, or did he not? Either answer is bad. If Trump did, he may be authorizing an unelected billionaire to exert unprecedented control over the internal workings of government payment systems. If he did not, then Musk may be going rogue to an even greater extent than we thought.
I contacted a few former officials at the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, to try to gauge what this means. What was striking is the level of alarm they evinced about it. Here’s how the Post describes these systems:
Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.
Former officials I spoke with were at a loss to explain why Musk would want such access. They noted that while we don’t yet know Musk’s motive, the move could potentially give DOGE the power to turn off all kinds of government payments in a targeted way. They said we now must establish if Musk is seeking to carry out what Trump tried via his federal funding freeze: Turn off government payments previously authorized by Congress. The White House rescinded the freeze after a national outcry, but Trump’s spokesperson vowed the hunt for spending to halt will continue. The former officials are asking: Is this Treasury power grab a way to execute that?
“Anybody who would have access to these systems is in a position to turn off funding selectively,” said Michael Linden, a former OMB official who is now director of Families Over Billionaires, a group fighting Trump’s tax cuts for the rich. “The only reason Musk wants to get himself in there must be because he wants to turn some things off.”
These officials describe these systems as almost akin to a series of faucets. Congress, by authorizing payments, fills the tanks and decides where the water will ultimately flow. The team overseen by the now-departing Lebryk in effect is in control of the spigots, these officials said.
What also alarms these officials is that this is unfolding even as a debt ceiling crisis looms. When the government is on the verge of defaulting on its obligations, these officials tell me, it’s Lebryk and his team who carefully monitor the situation to determine, to the greatest extent possible, on what date it will no longer be able to meet its obligations. This team monitors the water levels, these officials say, noting that this is how Treasury knows what to say in those letters that periodically warn Congress that a breach is approaching.
As it happens, this is precisely why we want career, nonpolitical civil servants to be in charge of the spigots. To put it delicately, this is some really complicated shit, and we want the process to be administered in a totally nonpoliticized way. Letting someone like Musk anywhere near it risks corrupting it quite deeply.
“The payment systems are controlled by a small number of career officials precisely to protect them and the full faith and credit of the United States from political interference,” said Jesse Lee, who was a senior adviser to the National Economic Council under President Joe Biden. Or as Linden put it: “This is exactly the kind of thing you do not want political appointees getting involved in.”
All of which is why it’s critical to know whether Trump directly authorized this move by Musk. Trump’s executive order creating DOGE orders agencies to give it access to “all” unclassified records and systems. As the Post notes, that would appear to include these Treasury ones.
But we need to know whether Trump was aware of or directly authorized this particular effort by DOGE to access Treasury’s payment systems. Even if a relatively innocent explanation for this is possible—maybe DOGE merely hopes to study how efficient they are—the move clearly alarmed this longtime government veteran enough to prompt his resignation. Did Trump want Musk to have this access, and if so, for what purpose?
“Is this something that has authorization and approval from the White House and specifically the president?” asked Bradley Moss, a national security lawyer, in an interview. “Or is this Musk going rogue within the federal bureaucracy?”
If Trump did greenlight it, Moss said, it would mean he’s “authorizing Elon to shove his weight into the most crucial parts of our financial mechanisms,” and “exposes the basic functions of government to the whims of a nongovernmental employee.” If Trump did not, it would represent a “complete abuse of authority and discretion” on Musk’s part: “He has no possible need for access to those systems.”
Whatever more we learn, this saga already demonstrates exactly why we want an apolitical, professionalized civil service, one in which career officials enjoy a variety of protections to safeguard their independence. As Jonathan Chait points out at The Atlantic, the whole point of the civil service system is precisely that it ensures that challenging, consequential government jobs go to people who are actually qualified to execute them.
Whatever Musk intends with this new effort, this isn’t part of any war on the “deep state.” We’re witnessing a broad assault on that genuinely meritocratic achievement, the civil service—one that could enable right-wing elites to corruptly loot the place, or install a highly “personalist” government marked above all by loyalty to Trump himself, or some combination of the two. And by all indications, that larger war is fully backed by the president himself.
