An US superior legislator says that Elon Musk’s representatives obtained “full access” to an American Treasury Payment System used to disperse billions of dollars to the Americans each year, and warned that Musk’s access The system poses a “national security risk”.
Senator Ron Wyden, a Democratic Senator of Oregon and classification member of the Senate finance committee, said in An article on Bluesky on Saturday That the sources said that the secretary of the Treasury of the Scott Bessent Office had given the Musk team, known as the government’s efficiency department, or DOGE, to access the very sensitive cash system on Friday . Authorization comes following an impasse earlier in the week, in which the highest -end career civil servant of the Treasury Leaving the department Follow the Musk team requests to access the system.
“Social benefits and benefits, subsidies, payments to government entrepreneurs, including those who compete directly with Musk’s own companies. All this, ”wrote Wyden in the post, referring to Doge’s access.
The New York Times also reported Friday, that Bessent granted Doge access to the Treasury payment system. One of the representatives of the DOGE granted by access would be Tom Krause, the general manager of Cloud software groupwhich has Citrix and several other companies. Krause did not return the request for comments from Techcrunch. A treasury spokesperson did not comment when he sent an email on Saturday.
This is the last effort of Musk and its associates to resume the interior functioning of the American federal government after the return of President Trump on January 20. After its inauguration, Trump immediately ordered Musk to start making general reductions in federal government spending.
The system managed by the Treasury Tax Services Office controls the disbursements of approximately 6 billions of federal funds to American households, in particular social security and the benefits, tax reimbursements and payments to employees and federal entrepreneurs Americans, according to A letter written by Wyden And sent to Bessent a day earlier. Access to the payment system was historically limited to a few staff because it contains personal information on millions of Americans who receive payments from the federal government, by time.
According to Wyden’s letter, the payment system “can simply not fail, and any politically motivated interference in them risks serious damage to our country and the economy”.
In his letter, Wyden said that he feared that the vast trade operations of Musk in China “endanger American cybersecurity” and creates conflicts of interest which “make its access to these systems a risk of national security” .
Last year, Biden administration blamed China for a series of intrusions targeting American critical infrastructure, theft of telephone files for senior US officials during the violations of several American phones and internet giants, and a violation of own treasury systems at the end of last year. Wyden, also a long -standing member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said it was “unusual to grant access to systems sensitive to a person with such important commercial interests in China”.
Several other federal departments are examined by DOGE, including the own human resources department of the federal government, known as the staff management office.
Reuters reported Friday That Musk representatives have locked the career civil servants of IT systems, which contain personal data and human resources files of millions of federal employees. The OPM was hacked in 2015, that the US government later awarded China, which led to the theft of personnel files on more than 22 million US government employees, including staff with authorizations security.
