Musk now controls all US payments 🚨 | USDA freezes payments to farmers

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DOGE will keep limited access to Treasury payments system with 2 associates having ‘read-only’ view​

“…
Two Treasury Department employees affiliated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will keep limited access to the highly sensitive payment system within the agency, following emergency court proceedings Wednesday that arose out of privacy concerns about DOGE’s access to the system.

The Trump administration agreed to the limitation that the two Treasury employees have “read-only” access to the system and won’t share it with others working with DOGE, a new court filing said. A federal judge still must sign off on the proposal but signaled earlier in the day she would be willing to do so.

The proposal would keep the status quo since DOGE sent two special government employees to the Treasury Department, Tom Krause and Marko Elez, who both came from tech jobs to Washington since Donald Trump took office.

… During a hearing on the access earlier Wednesday, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the DC District Court tried to nail down how Musk and his DOGE team are accessing the department’s sensitive payments system.

But government attorneys provided little detail on DOGE’s mission and had few definitive answers.

Lawyers for the Justice Department told Kollar-Kotelly that Musk himself and the White House [probably] hadn’t seen copies of the sensitive personal data contained in the department’s payments system, as federal workers have feared.

“Not that I’m aware of,” the DOJ attorney, Brad Humphreys, hedged at the court hearing Wednesday.

“I don’t know if I can say nothing has been done” with records in the system, Humphreys said, adding that the Justice Department doesn’t believe Americans’ privacy has been breached at this time. …”
 
Patb78 said:
Trump’s response has to be almost the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard a President say. JFC!!
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This past summer (maybe fall), I mentioned that within a year, don would be unfit for regular public appearances. I think I'm off by 6-12 months, as he'll have access to the best possible drugs and Wag the Dog set pieces. By mid-terms, however, I suspect don is making scripted appearances and these media scrums are effectively over, or highly coordinated by handlers and the likes of brietbart, oan, and the like. His cognitive agility is shockingly poor compared with just one year ago. Fred died of Alzheimer's at 93, preceded by about a decade of reported decline, and I don't think Fred ever carried the type of weight don has.
 
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Musk associates sought to use critical Treasury payment system to shut down USAID spending, emails show​


"Four days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk’s top lieutenants at the Treasury Department asked its acting secretary, a career civil servant, to immediately shut off all USAID payments using the department’s own ultra-sensitive payment processing system.

The ask was so out of line with how Treasury normally operates, it prompted a skeptical reply from David Lebryk, then serving as acting Treasury secretary, who said he did not believe “we have the legal authority to stop an authorized payment certified by an agency,” according to a source familiar with the exchange.

Lebryk suggested a “legally less risky approach” would be for the State Department, which oversees USAID, to rescind the payments itself and examine whether they complied with President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order freezing foreign development aid.

Tom Krause, a former tech executive and now the top DOGE staffer at Treasury, responded that Lebryk could have legal risk himself should he choose not to comply.

This back and forth over email, described to CNN by a source familiar with it, reveals the first known indication that Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency emissaries sought to use Treasury’s tools to block some payments, fulfilling the president’s political agenda.

The ensuing controversy set off a chain reaction around Washington this week, sparking a tense political debate and emergency court proceedings over DOGE’s access to the system and the administration’s potential interest in using it to turn off payments as it chooses.

... Last Friday, Lebryk announced his sudden departure from government service, ending his more than 35-year career at Treasury.,,,"
 


A 25-Year-Old Is Writing Backdoors Into The Treasury’s $6 Trillion Payment System. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?​


www.techdirt.com

A 25-Year-Old Is Writing Backdoors Into The Treasury’s $6 Trillion Payment System. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Just months after we learned Chinese hackers had compromised US telecom systems through government-mandated backdoors, an inexperienced developer from Musk’s DOGE unit is pushing untested cod…
www.techdirt.com www.techdirt.com

“Just months after we learned Chinese hackers had compromised US telecom systems through government-mandated backdoors, an inexperienced developer from Musk’s DOGE unit is pushing untested code directly into the Treasury’s payment infrastructure — a system that handles over $6 trillion in federal payments annually.

It seems reasonable to call it one of the most dangerous cyberattacks on the US government.

… [In response to questions] Treasury responded with reassurances: just “read only” access, they claimed, with no ability to interfere with payments

… But while Treasury was making these claims, both Wired and TPM revealed a far more alarming reality: a 25-year-old DOGE team member named Marko Elez (who had refused to give any of his brand new colleagues his last name) had been granted something far beyond “read only” access — he had full administrator privileges to the system. That’s the keys to the kingdom (or, rather, the kingdom’s payments).

…
And Elez’s qualifications for this extraordinary level of access to our nation’s financial infrastructure? According to Wired’s reporting, a mere three and a half years of experience since graduating Rutgers, split between SpaceX and ExTwitter’s Search AI team. Neither position involved anything remotely close to handling critical financial infrastructure or government payment systems.

But it gets worse. Josh Marshall’s reporting at TPM reveals something that I can already hear developers howling about, even through the internet: Elez isn’t just looking at the code — he’s pushing untested changes directly into production on a system that handles trillions in federal payments:

I’m told that Elez and possibly other DOGE operatives received full admin-level access on Friday, January 31st. The claim of “read only” access was either false from the start or later fell through. The DOGE team, which appears to be mainly or only Elez for the purposes of this project, has already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system. They have not locked out the existing programmer/engineering staff but have rather leaned on them for assistance, which the staff appear to have painedly provided hoping to prevent as much damage as possible — “damage” in the sense not of preventing the intended changes but avoiding crashes or a system-wide breakdown caused by rapidly pushing new code into production with a limited knowledge of the system and its dependencies across the federal government.
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Remember Treasury’s reassurance that no payments would be blocked? That appears to have been, at best, aspirational. At worst, deliberately misleading. Marshall’s sources indicate that the code changes have a very specific purpose: creating mechanisms to block payments while hiding the evidence. …”
 
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“… Let’s be clear about what we’re seeing: deliberately obscured payment-blocking capabilities being added to absolutely critical government infrastructure by an inexperienced developer with minimal oversight. In cybersecurity terms, that’s not just a backdoor — it’s flashing warning lights of an approaching catastrophe. …”

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That court order agreed to (which I posted in an earlier post above) is hopelessly naive about what is going on with the coding admin access and what that could mean. It expressly allows Elez to continue to have access and there is no apparent mechanism to co firm that he is or will be honoring the limitations on his access, especially if DOGe has been lying from the outset about the extent of the access.
 
CFordUNC said:
How is this okay?
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Pubs would literally be storming the Capitol (again) if this type of shittery was happening under a Dem administration. Thousands would already be dead. I'm glad Dems are showing more restraint than that, but the lid can only be kept on for so long, especially as more information comes out and the level of anger about the intentional dismantling of the basic building blocks of our government rises.
 
lawtig02 said:
Pubs would literally be storming the Capitol (again) if this type of shittery was happening under a Dem administration. Thousands would already be dead. I'm glad Dems are showing more restraint than that, but the lid can only be kept on for so long, especially as more information comes out and the level of anger about the intentional dismantling of the basic building blocks of our government rises.
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Yeah but at least there are like 4 trans kids out there somewhere in America who have been put in their place.
 
farce© said:
Trump wants to personally approve or disapprove all payments. He thinks he can run this like the owner of a small business guarding the checkbook.
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Being the great business person he claims to be.
 
ChapelHillSooner said:
So on the potential criminal charges, first I don’t know exactly what crimes Musk may have committed but some of this stuff has to be very questionable.

So let’s just assume Musk has or will commit serious crimes. That leaves Trump with significant leverage over the richest man in the world.

We know Trump sells pardons. We also know that selling pardons almost certainly does not put Trump at legal risk given the immunity ruling. Trump could flat out demand a hundred billion dollars for a pardon, and Musk could be forced to pay it.

Which would in a way be f’ing hilarious.
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Selling a Pardon would be an official act as President? Humm. I get that under the current alignment it would be impossible to prosecute the crime of selling a Pardon. But if things get bad, that could change.
 
BlueSmoke said:
Selling a Pardon would be an official act as President? Humm. I get that under the current alignment it would be impossible to prosecute the crime of selling a Pardon. But if things get bad, that could change.
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The Supreme Court ruled that no evidence relating to the terms of the pardon could even be introduced at a trial. Thus, it will be impossible to convict for selling pardons unless the pardoned person coughed it up (which wouldn't happen). This was the point on which ACB dissented but she didn't get any of the other 5 to go along.

This is why a lot of what the Supreme Court has done will have to be thrown out. I do not expect us to be bound by this bullshit. So we're going to have to make plans for how that's going to happen.

I've been trying to point out what I thought was obvious (but apparently is not); that illegitimate law has little power when it all comes down to dust. If the Supreme Court turns Trump into an unaccountable dictator, then he will meet the same fate as most dictators (and so will they). That's just the way the world works. There are centuries worth of evidence on this point. Dictators don't retire. That's just not what happens. They rule until they can rule no more, and then if they are lucky they find exile. The relatively few occasions in which dictators were dealt with in the legal system didn't go so well.
 
Paine said:
The lesson they need to take away is that there are no good billionaires. It doesn’t matter if a certain billionaire is altruistic or giving to Dem causes; no one should have that amount of money and power.
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Surely you are talking about billionaires as a class (or as an individual member of that class), not as individuals themselves. I'm sure plenty of billionaires are fine people...
 
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