Elon Musk's minions have gained access to the federal government's financial plumbing system – as well as sensitive data belonging to millions of Americans – and an expert explained the "extraordinarily, incomprehensibly dire" threats posed by the situation.
Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer working under the quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency, reportedly has the ability to alter the complex code that dispenses Social Security checks, tax returns and nearly all other payments the federal government makes to Americans, but researcher Nathan Tankus outlined the dangers posed Musk's lackeys at his Crises Notes website.
"Musk, [Donald] Trump and their respective cronies have unrestricted access to your Social Security numbers, your confidential bank information, your confidential medical information and so much more," Tankus wrote. "This is true with just 'read only' access."
There's been some disagreement in media reporting over whether Elez, a Musk employee who has no prior government experience, is only able to access the sensitive data held by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service or whether he also has the ability to rewrite some of its computer coding, but Tankus said the distinction is a "red herring."
"It matters, don’t get me wrong," Tankus wrote. "As a source yesterday said, apocalyptic. But that source also said that 'read only' was 'catastrophic.' If the smash and grab operation commences just as stupidly, quickly and dangerously as it has so far, this could easily become identity theft by an untold number of people using their personally identifiable information within weeks."
The researcher said that information could be used to target enemies, and he worries they will weaponize the Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC), & the Combating the Finance of Terror (CFT) laws if they gain control of other agencies.
"In short, they can not just steal money but eliminate the financial existence of anyone they felt like, if operational control gets sufficient," Tankus wrote. "The week Trump won his second term, I told a room full of Democratic party operatives that 'if the Democratic Party really believed Trump was a fascist, they would destroy the servers containing all the surveillance data.'"
Tankus said the tech billionaire's allies could create “backdoors” into the Treasury Department’s multi-trillion dollar payment system that would be nearly impossible to find, even if they were pushed out of their unlawful position in the bureau, but he doubts the courts will sufficiently intervene – in part because Musk's team has burrowed into that financial system and could choke off law enforcement funding.
"What happens if they are just embedded so deeply in the heart of government payments that there is no mechanism to dislodge them?" Tankus wrote. "Court Injunctions are not self enforcing either ... As we’ve seen, there are no armed law enforcement figures coming in to save the day and if Musk's DOGE get deep enough into the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the only way to enforce the law is through street actions."
Musk holds billions of dollars in government contracts, and he can instruct his DOGE allies to simply put his competitors on the "do not pay" list to enhance his power and advance his long-standing goal of forcing consumers to use X, formerly known as Twitter, as an "everything app" for all their transactions – which a source explained to Tankus.
"Such information obtained [in 'read-only' access] on an inside track by DOGE would be very helpful, for example, if you are an entity like X Payments LLC and are currently licensed as a money transmitter in 42 states with plans to launch as-yet-to-be specified payments and financial services," a longtime payments lawyer told Tankus.
"It is unclear whether there are any limitations on DOGE personnel transferring payment information to X Payments LLC in order for that company to gain proprietary information regarding federal payments in an anti-competitive manner compared to its fintech competitors currently in the marketplace," that lawyer added. "Such single-sourced information not available to other market competitors would provide an anti-competitive jump for X Payments LLC on ApplePay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay (mobile wallets) and a host of other fintech companies in the marketplace backed by venture capital and private equity funding."
Congress holds the constitutional authority to direct federal spending, but DOGE's access to the Bureau of Fiscal Service's sensitive data allows Musk and the executive branch to circumvent that – and Tankus warned that the youthful engineers placed in the agency could simply wreck the system by mistake or otherwise.
"Even a disruption for a day would be a disaster," Tankus wrote. "A disruption on longer timescales would have unimaginable knock on effects. The Treasury could involuntarily default because of operational issues. The worst case scenarios, which are completely and utterly plausible at the time of writing, would be a catastrophe without precedent. No typical economic calamity like the Great Financial Crisis or even the Great Depression would be comparable."