A financial expert sounded the alarm over Elon Musk's scheme to control the flow of federal dollars.
The unelected tech billionaire shoved his allies into the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service and forced out its most senior non-political official, David Lebryk, in a dispute over the payment system, and economy writer Nathan Tankus published a column for Rolling Stone expressing abject terror of Musk's plans for his takeover.
"Musk and DOGE’s efforts to take over the Bureau of the Fiscal Service is as dangerous as it gets," Tankus wrote. "It is paramount that career civil service employees be allowed to run the Treasury’s payments system without capricious and self-serving interference from billionaires and their allies."
The tech mogul seems hyper-focused on rooting out supposedly fraudulent payments, but Tankus said his remarks show he doesn't fully understand how the system works or the layers that have developed over the years to ensure its integrity.
And he worries that Musk will call for changes that could wreck its delicate balance.
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"I don’t think Musk understands the full scope of what he’s playing with," Tankus wrote. "I think they have no idea what they’re doing. They are coming across systems for the first time. They’re thinking, oh you can do that. The possibilities are exciting but have no vision for an endpoint to any of this. I want them out of there now. It is very unclear, I think that they got in there, realized yeah this can help with impoundment and you should be able to stop payments, then they heard, 'Oh you don’t stop payments at Treasury?' Now they’re obsessed with idea of stopping payments."
"I think it’s right to not assume perfect competency," he added. "So from an information technology standpoint, how easily could we tip from a flawless flow of payments into something broken?"
Musk has called for eliminating 25 percent of government spending, but he's worried that his plans for the Bureau of the Fiscal Service are even more dire than playing games to justify those cuts.
"If you told me now that the issue would be using the debt ceiling to justify spending cuts, I would breathe such a sigh of relief," Tankus told The American Prospect. "That is just a normal five-alarm fire constitutional crisis. Where I’m at right now, from the moment I read the Washington Post reporting on Friday to this moment, I have been filled with unmitigated terror. It’s a major motivation why I spent 20 continuous hours writing this piece. I am filled with terror, and not because of a constitutional crisis of using the debt ceiling to unconstitutionally impound spending."
Tankus fears that making changes without understanding the system could crash the department's ability to send checks to grantees and beneficiaries, but he's even more terrified of Musk being given control of its highly sensitive personal data and what he might use that information to consolidate more power for himself.
"In many ways, the United States functions — to the extent it functions — because agencies keep sensitive confidential information private," Tankus wrote. "If people come to believe that any information they provide the federal government will be a token granting Donald Trump and Elon Musk greater power over them, a multitude of essential functions will fall apart."
Tankus said Musk and his allies would ask for permission to make changes to the system's coding unless they intended to make changes under the hood.
He envisions a scenario once that happens where checks could be withheld for virtually any reason.
"How granular could that get?" he said. "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," Tankus added. "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 ... 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. If an agency is resisting, on an unclear timeline, they may be able to suffocate one agency’s payments. And if there’s even one day payments are not going out, it can be catastrophic. As we saw last week with the freeze at OMB."