5 questions about DOGE's access to federal payment systems

Questions are swirling about how much access Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has to Americans’ personal data and sensitive federal payment systems.

Soon after President Trump took office, Musk deployed members of his cost-cutting panel to the Treasury Department with eyes on the Bureau of Fiscal Service: the agency responsible for processing federal payments and revenue.

The Fiscal Service is functionally the accounts-payable department of the federal government, handling many trillions of dollars’ worth of transactions per year, including Social Security and Medicare payments.

Reports of DOGE employees accessing crucial payment systems and forcing out a three-decade veteran of the Treasury Department spurred alarm among Democrats, career staffers and financial experts.

The White House and Treasury Department maintain that the administration is simply conducting a review of the Fiscal Service, and that DOGE employees will only be able to observe, not change, payments being made through the agency.

But internal Treasury emails indicate that Treasury’s chief of staff had been pushing to use access to the payment system in order to freeze payments for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), according to Thursday reporting by The New York Times.

And Musk called Thursday for greater control over the Treasury payment system, shortly after the Justice Department agreed to restrict the number of employees affiliated with DOGE who can access such programs. The order came in response to a lawsuit filed by several government unions against the Treasury Department.

"Billions of taxpayer dollars to known FRAUDULENT entities are STILL being APPROVED by Treasury," Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he purchased in 2022.

"This needs to STOP NOW!"

Here are five big questions about DOGE's access to the federal payments system.

How much access does DOGE have?

The White House has denied multiple reports that DOGE employees have been given extensive access to Fiscal Service systems.

Wired magazine reported Tuesday that a 25-year-old former Musk employee named Marko Elez had administrative “privileges [that] include the ability not just to read but to write code” on two Treasury systems known as the Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and the Secure Payments System (SPS). SPS is how the Fiscal Service receives payments and PAM is how the government issues them.

Elez and Tom Krause, CEO of Cloud Software Group, were the two special federal employees authorized under the Justice Department's order to access the Fiscal Service, but not to edit or make changes to the system.

Elez, however, resigned Thursday after The Wall Street Journal revealed a series of racist social media posts from a since-deleted social media account, the White House confirmed.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday the DOGE team was not “tinkering” with the system.

“There is no tinkering with the system. They are on read-only,” he said. “They are looking. They can make no changes. It is an operation program to suggest improvements.”

“They have no ability to change the system. I have no ability to grant that change,” he added.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday that DOGE engineers were not allowed to write new code for payment systems.

A White House spokesperson previously told The Hill that DOGE is making good on President Trump’s promise to make government more accountable and restore stewardship of taxpayer dollars.

What’s the purpose of the access?

Both Trump and Musk pledged for months before and after the 2024 election that the billionaire would lead aggressive efforts to cut both the size of the federal government and the amount of money it spends.

DOGE's interest in the Treasury payment system has raised concerns of Trump appointees unilaterally blocking payments that were already approved by Congress and signed into law by the president.

Musk has claimed the Fiscal Service was processing billions of dollars in fraudulent payments that should not have been sent. But experts say the Fiscal Service has no legal authority to block payments that it is ordered under law to process.

“The Bureau of Fiscal Service isn’t a policy job with political appointees. It is totally mechanical: agencies tell the Bureau who gets tax credits, who gets grants, which contractors to pay — and they get the money out,” said Natasha Sarin, a professor at Yale Law School and a former Biden Treasury Department official.

Sarin said she couldn’t think of a legitimate reason that political appointees would want to gain access to the payment system, and that it amounted to short-circuiting the pathway of intended Treasury operations.

Before Elez's resignation, the White House had declined to comment on whether he had both read and write access to the base code, or on what technical changes were being made to the PAM and SPS platforms at Treasury.

The ongoing operations of DOGE may be seen as disruptive by those entrenched in the federal bureaucracy, a White House spokesperson added.

Journalist and economic researcher Nathan Tankus told The Hill that DOGE staff may be targeting another platform known as the Automated Standard Application for Payments (ASAP), which is used in part to pay non-profit organizations.

“ASAP is the system that you would use if you wanted to target specific government agencies in the grants and other disbursements that they make and if you also wanted especially to target disfavored nonprofits,” he said.

“According to my reporting, they have access, technical details and are getting data from and making changes to ASAP, to PAM and another system called ITS, the International Treasury Service,” he added. ITS is the Fiscal Service system for making international payments.

Is your personal data safe?

Even with read-only access, DOGE officials have access to Americans’ core financial information, including Social Security numbers.

“We are talking about the Social Security numbers and private information about every single American,” Sarin said.

Personal data concerns were at the core of the federal union lawsuit filed against the Treasury Department, which led to the DOJ order limiting DOGE access.

The unions accused Bessent of improperly disclosing sensitive personal and financial information to Musk’s allies.

“The scale of the intrusion into individuals’ privacy is massive and unprecedented,” the unions wrote. “Millions of people cannot avoid engaging in financial transactions with the federal government and, therefore, cannot avoid having their sensitive personal and financial information maintained in government records.”

The DOJ order, approved by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly on Thursday morning, will hold while the judge considers whether to grant the unions a preliminary injunction.

Is it legal to gain access like this?

The union lawsuit is among several legal challenges to DOGE's involvement in federal payment systems.

“People who must share information with the federal government should not be forced to share information with Elon Musk or his ‘DOGE.’ And federal law says they do not have to,” read a complaint filed by the Alliance for Retired Americans and other groups.

Labor federation AFL-CIO and some of its affiliated public sector unions also sued on Wednesday about DOGE getting access to the Labor Department.

A White House spokesperson told The Hill that DOGE efforts are being undertaken in compliance with federal law by people with appropriate security clearances, whom they described as employees of the relevant agencies, as opposed to outside advisors.

What’s at stake for global payments?

Like a lot of government computer code, much of the Fiscal Service payment system is written in COBOL, a legacy programming language that’s not compatible with a lot of more modern software.

Some of it is even written in Assembly language, an even more basic type of computer code that corresponds with binary, on-off instructions of machine code.

Experts described these systems as quite fragile and easy to screw up.

“They make one wrong move, and they could easily break this system,” Tankus said. “Everything has enormous operational IT risk now.”

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