From "Elon Musk’s team has gotten access to the Treasury Department’s payments system" (NYT).
This continues the story discussed earlier today in "What the DOGE team discovered."
February 1, 2025
"Mr. Musk, who has been given wide latitude by President Trump to find ways to slash government spending, has recently fixated..."
"... on Treasury’s payment processes, criticizing the department in a social media post on Saturday for not rejecting more payments as fraudulent or improper. It is not clear whether the team led by Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, has blocked any payments since gaining access to the system."
From "Elon Musk’s team has gotten access to the Treasury Department’s payments system" (NYT).
From "Elon Musk’s team has gotten access to the Treasury Department’s payments system" (NYT).
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71 comments:
X’s own Community Notes has a better journalistic standards than these hacks.
“My experience with DOGE has been totally wild so far. I told you yesterday about the $600 million per year the Pentagon was spending on Sushi... Well, I just found another wild one! The Air Force was spending $1,280 per paper coffee cup! Like literally those ones you find at the office. $1280!!! We also found that $230k per month was being spent by the IRS on Starbucks Cinnamon Roast K Cups, but everyone was working from home!
Anyway, back to work! Have a great day!”
—— Elon Musk
"Elon Musk’s team has gotten access to the Treasury Department’s payments system" (NYT).
I tend to think DOGE has access to the "Reports" module of the system, not the payment issuing module.
Warrior/Gourmand?
"It is not clear whether the team led by Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, has blocked any payments since gaining access to the system."
Give him time. Musk is still struggling with the shocking fact that total, witless, rubber-stamp incompetence is no impediment to a GS-15 salary and benefits package at the Treasury Department.
So they don't like Musk exposing them... why are we not shocked... cockroaches don't like the light being shined on them.
…meanwhile WH press corpse was trolling for a Menendez pardon yesterday. Certainly off topic in this thread. Certainly…
Yes, access does not necessarily mean direct control.
A fentanyl addicted hobo has better jounalistic standards than those hacks.
Imagine if D.O.G.E hired several thousand forensic accountants. I wouldn't surprise if we run a balanced budget if all the nonsense spending was cut immediately.
Exactly. All Musk and his team wanted was to see the who was being paid, how much they were being paid, and who was filing for the payments. The changes to who gets paid and for what will happen at the source level of authority, not at Treasury payment systems. And I pretty bet you that he went this route because the apparatchiks in the various departments told his team they didn't have any centralized records for who was receiving their departments' funds.
Remember the breathless commentary in 2020 when Mark Zuckerberg gave something like a half a billion $ to the Democrats and his people were granted read/write access to Wisconsin's official voter roles. Yes, they could change the status of voters without even having to go through officials, and they focused entirely on Democrat heavy precincts to "get out the vote." I am betting that all Musk has is the ability to pull reports.
I have read that Treasury Department payment approval officers are in the GS-15 salary band. The bottom edge of that band, with Washington, DC, locality pay, is $167,603 and the top edge is $195,200. That’s a fair piece of change for just rubber stamping vouchers.
Maybe the New York Times could focus on the ballooning structural deficit, and the things that are going to be required to bring it back into line with economic growth, you know, like either massive taxes on everybody, not just the rich, or massive inflation —History says that governments usually choose inflation as the least politically painful path to oblivion. Who would have thought that cutting spending might be a viable approach?
"It is not clear whether the team led by Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, has blocked any payments since gaining access to the system."
1. Was it really necessary for the NYT to point out that Musk is "the world's wealthiest man" to the 3 NYT readers that may not have known that fact?
2. If it was necessary, then why not mention this fact immediately when Musk is first mentioned in the article? Why add this to the line about it being unknown whether or not the DOGE team has blocked any payments? What are they trying to imply?
3. What is the connection between the integrity of an audit and the personal wealth of the auditor?
"Rubber stamping vouchers," and voting reliably for the gravy train.
That Air Force paper coffee cup thing - I want more detail before I go 'That ain't right'. I could see it per pallet of disposable coffee cups. Case of good ones (500 count) goes for about $80. Pallet of 36 cases would be $2880. Military bulk buy - then down to $1,280.
Details matter.
They want to imply that he's getting everything cut out of the budget.
And you know, I'd be good with him getting, oh... 10% of the savings. You know - as an incentive.
It is also not clear whether the team led by Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, has rounded up and killed any Jews since gaining access to the system.
Jerry, who cares about the unit price? The point is, if you want to drink coffee, breing in a washable cup (or you could buy a small supply yourself for use by yoy and your office mates). I worked for the feds for over six years and we never used disposable cups.
The "team" is led by Donald Trump. Elon Musk is a member of that team. It is not Musk's team.
"Rubber stamping vouchers" ... I think you mean "laundering taxpayer dollars to Democrats."
From this source: https://apnews.com/article/pandemic-fraud-waste-billions-small-business-labor-fb1d9a9eb24857efbe4611344311ae78
“An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.”
That’s just from one program. I don’t know about you, but I consider a 10% fraud rate unacceptable. Coincidently or not, that’s also the reported fraud rate for Medicare and Medicaid each year. That’s a lot of money, but no one in government seems to think that reducing the fraud is important. They just keep demanding ever more money from taxpayers and more borrowing to keep doing what they’re doing. This makes me question as to whether they just don’t care, they’re too incompetent to fix it, and/or they’re personally profiting from the fraud themselves.
From this source: https://apnews.com/article/pandemic-fraud-waste-billions-small-business-labor-fb1d9a9eb24857efbe4611344311ae78
“An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.”
That’s just from one program. I don’t know about you, but I consider a 10% fraud rate unacceptable. Coincidently or not, that’s also the reported fraud rate for Medicare and Medicaid each year. That’s a lot of money, but no one in government seems to think that reducing the fraud is important. They just keep demanding ever more money from taxpayers and more borrowing to keep doing what they’re doing. This makes me question as to whether they just don’t care, they’re too incompetent to fix it, and/or they’re personally profiting from the fraud themselves.
Air Force flying passengers - you're not going to see ceramics, you'll see paper cups. Impromptu mass feedings? You're going to see paper products used. Hot day on the flight line? Water coolers will have paper cups. Out at the plant I worked at we had bottled water because the piping was so old - so paper cups.
Not taking Elon's "wild" claims at face value, but follow the money is, as always, the right approach. Even if actual savings are modest, greater transparency and accountability will be good.
I was a fed auditor, CPA, and later a chief of systems dept (manual and automated systems) for an agency with $500 million annual revenues (in 1972) before I left to get my law degree. I could steer him to multiple places and categories where he would be stunned at the waste. I even thought about volunteering to help Musk until I heard he was looking for unpaid volunteers to work 100 hours/week. At age 74, with some physical issues, I had to admit that was too much for me. Who is actually helping him now?
"It is not clear whether the team led by Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, has blocked any payments since gaining access to the system."
"But we sure hope implying that he might have will convince people he has."
The employees should bring their own coffee mug from home, like normal employees… and if working in an office setting, a vendor is usually supplying coffee via vending machines. Coffee and cups.
Unless that makes no sense in this setting.
Jerry, I was a veteran Air Force weather man before college. I worked in flight ops and I can tell you that most everything you said is bs. Bring your own f'g bottle of water to work like everyone else in the US today. I was stationed at a remote radar station with ONLY bottled water in coolers - but we used washable cups. I also was stationed at an Army air field in Germany and I do not remember ever seeing a paper cup.
Bingo!
Corrupt leftists in power and their media buttsniffers - HATE transparency.
"It is not clear whether the team led by Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, has blocked any payments since gaining access to the system."
Are any of their readers taken in by this dishonest phrasing? If they had a scintilla of evidence that he had, they'd be screaming it from the rafters.
President Whitmore, "I don't understand. Where does all this come from? How do you get funding for something like this?"
Julius Levinson, "You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you?"
OT:
"Harwood is a known moron, but there is an interesting insight here. The left thinks it's fascism when their unelected permanent bureaucracy is placed under the control of the people's elected chief executive."
X
Fact.
carry on.
Does the NYT express any interest at what Musk et al. are finding?
In the 1980s Ronald Reagan wanted to increase military spending. The Democrats held hostile fraudulent public hearings and said the military was paying $600 for toilet seats and hammers. As I recall, contracting rules at the time required all contract cost overages to be evenly divided between every additional item. So, a light switch was set to the same value as a new building air conditioning unit.
Wait and see. Ensure that Elon hasn't misread something or mistaken 1 cup for 1 sea van full of cups (@Jerry). Similarly, Elon may not understand that Pentagon staff were all in the office in secure rooms during the DC COVID lockdowns. They had full parking lots and face masks, as secure rooms were never compatible with remote work. Back in the 1990s Bill Clinton mocked government spending on "stress in plants" not knowing that this is a hugely important issue for agriculture. Heat and water loss = stress.
The truly toxic federal staff are the SES. Their main career mission is to (1) maintain their program's budget, and (2) prevent any external oversight whatsoever. Oh, they also nod and say "yes, yes, yes" in meetings as the knife you in the back.
Several dozen may be enough...
I continue to agree with @Jerry, and think there may be less than meet's the eye. Air Force is supremely concerned about weight. Saving weight with paper cups may reduce the amount spent on fuel. Talk to a logistics expert before judging.
Still, the government found a way to pay contract janitors and security guards during the mandatory lockdowns (i.e., 18 months to 2 years). There was zero dust and clean carpets for all those remote workers. This was when many federal offices were running at 6% to 7% occupancy.
Mr. Musk, who has been given wide latitude by President Trump to find ways to slash government spending, has recently fixated..."
The NYT often invokes pop-psychological jargon to describe their opponents using words like "fixated."
Musk is building spaceships, cars, etc. Is there anyone on the planet Earth who is less "fixated" on any one thing?
Musk dances with insanity, as world-changing people often do. "On the autism spectrum" keeps coming up in recent posts. There are plenty of sympathetic reform-oriented people who cannot afford a no pay position nor can they physically handle 100 hour work weeks. Government will never be a small, agile tech startup.
That sure sounds like a question ("It is not clear...") that could be answered by someone willing to look into the issue and report what they have discovered, don't you think? I wonder why they haven't done that.
Aircrew - C-130 flight engineer, 1978-80, USAFR until 2003. Offices I were in usually had paper cups for the coffee fund. Carrying passengers? Paper cups. Unit picnic? Paper products. Want to bring in your own? Go right ahead, but the paper or styrofoam cups were there for guests. Sometimes on the UTA weekends, chow hall had paper products. (Didn't improve the food any though. The coffee was horrible either way)
"I wonder why they haven't done that."
Well, it's not like they're journalists. Oh, wait…
Black boot Army, 1987-1992. Was issued a ww2 era steel mess kit. Turned it in unused when I ETS’d - because every time we got hot chow in the field, it was served on paper plates, plastic cutlery, paper cups. Didnt even put the mess kit on the packing list for the Gulf War.
Better for field hygiene to use disposable items vs trying to sanitize reusable ones after every use. Also speeds up the meal process, to tactical advantage.
JSM
We've taken the Treasury! On to the radio stations, Comrades!
He's got the checkbook. Panic in the streets of DC.
That's going to depend. On whether or not that can they use what Musk finds to criticize Trump.
The thing they are missing is not whether Musk is blocking payments, it is whether we need any "people" at all to block payments. If you have a bunch of auditors who don't audit, get rid of the auditors, since they aren't doing anything. That's what he did at twitter.
why should anything in the treasury be sensitive?
Are we not a constitutional republic - with elected leaders who are supposed to represent we the people?
Or are we to be ruled by a secret cabal - behind leftist puppets?
I wouldn't be surprised if the LLM couldn't be trained on the Treasury data and find fraud just as easily.
No no they got root access and DBA god-rights and even as we speak they are dropping tables left and right without any change control!
Why are any of these civil servants drinking coffee in the first place? Coffee is for closers only. Those folks could not close a shower curtain.
You think Elon is fucking with you? He is not fucking with you. He is here from Downtown. He's here from Mitch and Murray.
I just realized it has been a few years since I watched that speech. Excuse my while I watch it again.
John Henry
I had direct knowledge of the $600 toilet seat because my boss at the time had worked for Lockheed at the Skunk Works. Lockheed had done the interior on these long range bombers and the model was no longer in production and one still in service was being repaired and the workmen broke or misplaced the seat. It had been out of production so long that the molds were not available and no off the shelf seat would fit and pass inspection. The cost to recreate the one obsolete seat was about $600, but it was misrepresented as being a scam or ripoff. Anyone who ever had to adhere to a DOD contract knows the penalty of not meeting specifications is something to avoid at all costs. In context the seat was a bargain.
Out of context it is a great legend of “government waste.” DOGE may find reality even more astounding than the headlines.
Evidence free claims on social media.
Yeah, we need more than that
This is what is impressive (and sometimes frustrating) to me. Notice, this is conservatives fact checking conservatives. Democrats move in lockstep. Both of these things are strengths and weaknesses, depending on the moment.
Dumb Lefty Mark: "Evidence free claims on social media. Yeah, we need more than that"
LOL
Yes. A New Soviet Democratical wrote that.
Just now.
As if the last 10 years never happened.
Discuss.
The NYT doesn't need to "find" anything to criticize Trump. As always, they'll just make something up again.
Again.
A Gawd. The ignorant Elon Musk and the rest of you folks need to understand how government procurement actually works. Let’s take cookies. All of you know what cookies are and no doubt somewhere between 90% to 100% of those reading my comment eat cookies and like to eat cookies, and no doubt many of you even bake cookies, especially in December.
If you want to sell cookie mix to the Department of Defense you must go to the Defense Logistics Agency (www.dla.mil) and look up MIL-C-43205G. It is 21 pages long and references at least five other standards, plus certain non-Defense agency standards (e.g., Department of Agriculture). If you want to sell cookie mix to the Department of Defense you must, on your dime, prove that your cookie mix satisfies all requirements in this specification. Perhaps needless to say, if I make and sell cookie mixes I cannot sell my boxes of mix for what I sell them to the public because I need to recoup the costs of demonstrating that I meet the specification’s requirements and this can be expensive. For instance I have to prove that all of the sugar is either cane sugar or beet sugar “or a combination of both.” The sugar also must be white — leaving out some of my late mother’s recipes thst call for brown sugar, and don’t even dream of trying to satisfy this specification with sugar-free cookie mix. Again, everything has to be proved, and you will find no urgency on the part of the DLA bureaucrats to expedite the process.
Thst’s Judy cookie mixes. My point is that if Musk and DOGE want to cut the cost of government they need to find a way to streamline the certification process for things the government buys in bulk while not leaving loopholes where unscrupulous contractors could, for instance, show up with pallets of cow turds and call them chocolate chip cookies.
That's my thing about this. An argument (a bad one) could be made that if all these payments were approved through appropriations by Congress, required payment from decision by a federal court, or some well understood regulatory payment; then they should be rubber stamped. But you don't need a GS-15 to rubber stamp. You just need someone capable of verifying last known address.
If you need 21 pages of specifications/standards to help keep from being fooled into buying cow turds, you have problems.
The US federal government has problems? Jeez Louise, Mason G., you don’t say.
Look, it’s even worse than that. Back in the day I saw a Navy specification for a turnkey computer system that had to demonstrate hat it would continue to operate while submerged 3 feet deep in salt water. So much for the concept of keeping your surface ships on top of the water.
Trump is offering to pay people till September if they'll just go away then. And this program might pay for itself. I've seen graphs showing how there's two or three times as much spending in the last quarter of the year as in the other quarters as agencies shovel money out the door so as to keep their allocations up. So then, if a lot of Federal employees leave in September at the start of the fourth quarter, they can't shovel the money out the door. So that's how we get the money back from the separation payments Or, the Doge Boys could mandate that spending in the fourth quarter could not be higher than the average in the other three quarters.
@Mason G: There's been plenty of cases where suppliers DID provide crap goods on government contracts - which is why they're so stringent. It's been going on since Britain took to the seas, and they were getting barrels of rotting horsemeat for their sailing ships instead of properly preserved salt pork. It took a LOT of contact litigation to ensure that the Navy got what it needed.
One old MSgt I knew said that the paint that was being used in the '70s hadn't had the specifications changed since the 1950s - even though it cost the government more to have the 1950s paint formulas duplicated. They had a formula, they weren't going to change it just because time moved on.
It used to be that 'milspec' was about as good as you could get. Now it's 'minimum acceptable'. And there's loads of companies and people who'd gladly charge the government for substandard goods...
"There's been plenty of cases where suppliers DID provide crap goods on government contracts - which is why they're so stringent."
Are you saying that absent those specs, the government would not be able to refuse a shipment of cow turds when cookie mix was ordered?
The good part is, that we'll know about this soon, because there's a looming deadline to claim this option.
I think "not rejecting more payments as fraudulent or improper" is a weaselly way to phrase it when the problem was that they didn't reject any.
I'm saying that there's a lot of 'trust' that government has in its suppliers, primarily because of those specs. How would you like to get a can of chocolate chip cookie mix (which I got at a surplus store about 30 years ago) that had no chocolate chips it in? Or a tray pack of bread pudding that was missing sugar? Maybe a few thousand cold weather sleeping bags where they skimped on the insulation? How about some JP-8 that isn't quite what it should be as far as the volatiles go, so when you get to altitude it gets a bit... thick?
Sure, they could refuse shipments - and as I recall they would because they didn't adhere to the specs. But they're not going to be able to check everything - that's the problem. I remember one little scandal where a bored clerk was counting the number of paper clips in a box of 100. There were only 98. He checked another box, and there were 98. Third box? 98. He brought it up to his supervisor, and they checked a few different cases in the warehouse. Each was short 2 paper clips. Case of 100 boxes, that's 200 paper clips - and in the 70s-80s the AF used a LOT of paper clips. Sure, it's not much per box, but a few million boxes you could save a fair amount.
And they passed the initial inspections.
There was an awful lot of 'use it or lose it' spending towards the end of the fiscal year - because if you had anything extra, it showed you didn't need as much next year.
We always thought such budgeting was stupid - but when you're an E5, you don't get much say in the process.
@Mike (MJB Wolf)
Way I heard it in the '90s was that it was the lavatory in a C-141. Seems the thing was made out of sheet metal, and after a couple of decades the cover over the toilet kinda rusted out. Squadron was based in California.
Lockheed quoted some outrageous price because they no longer had the tooling and would have to make from scratch. One of the maintainers knew a guy over at a place that made dune buggies from fiberglass, he provided dimensions and specs and asked roughly how much each would cost. Guy came back with a price of about $6k each, because it was a large custom piece. (If I remember right, the lav of a C-141 had a holding tank right below the toilet. It was more of a pit toilet with a drain than a modern aircraft toilet, though I could well be wrong on that. It was about 5 feet wide, with the toilet seat and lid embedded in the cover.)
But it's been a few years, I could well be wrong.
Gonna be a wet blanket here:
Musk is not a federal employee. What OFFICIAL POWER does he have to demand the Treasury Dept open up anything for him or his people to inspect?
What constitutional provision allows Trump to go around its language that Executive "departments" be established by the Congress and not by EO's?
We ALL objected mightily when Biden and his wrecking crew destroyed constitutional provisions. Why the Fuck do we applaud Trump doing the same thing???
If this keeps up we will soon turn from a Constitutiona Republic to a banana republic under the rule of whoever happens to be in office.
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