Five former Treasury Secretaries are lashing out at the Trump administration’s analysis of federal spending, saying that, since 1946, the nation’s payment system has been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants.”
The opinion piece was published yesterday after a federal judge issued an order on Saturday temporarily halting access to federal payment systems by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team which is currently tracing massive amounts of federal spending in search of fraud and waste.
According to DOGE engineers mapping the flow of money via payment categories, payment rationales and basic audit controls had uncovered over $100 billion annually that was going to accounts without Social Security numbers, verification numbers or ID.
When Musk asked Treasury officials how much of that $100 billion was “unequivocal and obvious fraud” the answer was about half.
The judge’s order, which apparently came at the behest of 19 state Attorneys General, appears to be attempting to keep inconvenient data from Treasury officials, including newly confirmed Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent.
It also points to a much longer time frame over which questionable funding practices utilizing taxpayer dollars have been taking place.
Jeffrey A. Tucker, with the Brownstone Institute, illustrated the absurdity of this glaring lack of accountability in a post on X by comparing the Treasury to a company in which the CEO, the CFO and the owners/stockholders have no access to the accounting books and no ability to verify money coming and going.
The five former Treasury Secretaries express concern in their NY Times editorial that any attempt to rein in ongoing payments will “will be a breach of trust” and worry that “credibility, once lost, will prove difficult to regain.”
They seem far less concerned that U.S. taxpayers are being secretly fleeced out of at least a billion dollars a week that’s being fraudulently distributed by those “nonpartisan, career civil servants” or an administrative state that operates with so little accountability.