House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) is threatening that Democrats could leverage the government funding deadline of March 14 to stop Trump's Office of Management and Budget order that blocks funding from being released for key government programs.
In a new "Dear Colleague" letter revealed on Monday, Jeffries outlined the House Democratic strategy, which also targets tech billionaire Elon Musk's reported seizure of the Treasury Department's payment system, and with it the spending mechanism of the entire federal government.
"I have made clear to House Republican leadership that any effort to steal taxpayer money from the American people, end Medicaid as we know it or defund programs important to everyday Americans, as contemplated by the illegal White House Office of Management and Budget order, must be choked off in the upcoming government spending bill, if not sooner," said Jeffries.
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Additionally, he continued, "at my direction, legislation will be introduced shortly to prevent unlawful access to the Department of Treasury Bureau of the Fiscal Service payment system that contains highly confidential and personal information related to Social Security and Medicare recipients, taxpayers, households, nonprofits, businesses and federal contractors."
Musk's Department of Government Efficiency task force has reportedly seized control of the Treasury payment systems with a team of software engineers aged 19 to 24, and Musk himself has already bragged about "deleting" certain parts of the civil service, including the team that helped implement the Internal Revenue Service's new Direct File tax system that gives taxpayers an end run around private for-profit tax filing services.
Shortly after certain news outfits and online activists began circulating the names of those engineers, Trump's acting federal prosecutor in charge of D.C. sent out a memo threatening to investigate or criminally sanction anyone who may be involved in "imped[ing]" the work of Musk's team.
