31 January 2025

This is Not Good

The career civil servant who was acting Secretary of the Treasury, David Lebryk has quit after Elon Musk and his stooges took control of the federal payments system.

So Musk will be in control the check writing capability of the United States while having total access to all of the all the personal information of the recipients.

It is not reassuring that a man whose wealth is largely a product of what John Kenneth Galbraith called, "The Bezzle,"* has this power.

The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department left the agency after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.

David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues that was obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.

Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration. Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley executive who has now been detailed to Treasury, is among those involved, the people said. Krause did not respond to requests for comment.

………

When Scott Bessent was confirmed as treasury secretary on Monday, Lebryk ceased to be the acting agency head. Trump administration officials placed Lebryk on administrative leave before he announced he would step down, two of the people said. 

………

Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions. 

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The executive order Trump signed creating DOGE also instructed all agencies to ensure it has “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” which would appear to include the Treasury payment systems.

It is unclear precisely why Musk’s team sought access to those systems. But both Musk and the Trump administration more broadly have sought to control spending in ways that far exceed efforts by their predecessors and have alarmed legal experts.

………

Still, the possibility that government officials might try to use the federal payments system — which essentially functions as the nation’s checkbook — to enact a political agenda is unprecedented, said Mark Mazur, who served in senior Treasury Department roles during the Obama and Biden administrations.

“This is a mechanical job — they pay Social Security benefits, they pay vendors, whatever. It’s not one where there’s a role for nonmechanical things, at least from the career standpoint. Your whole job is to pay the bills as they’re due,” Mazur said. “It’s never been used in a way to execute a partisan agenda. … You have to really put bad intentions in place for that to be the case.”

Bad intentions are a given for this bunch.

There is no easier way to prove that the government does not work than to stop cutting checks.

Then, Trump and President Musk will privatize the system, which will take months, if not years to come to fruition, and one of Elon's friends will be taking a cut of every payment.

These failures will be used to justify draconian cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

We are fucked.

*In his book The Great Crash, Galbraith describes the bezzle as follows:

Alone among the various forms of larceny [embezzlement] has a time parameter. Weeks, months or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in—or more precisely not in—the country’s business and banks.

This inventory—it should perhaps be called the bezzle—amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times, people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances, the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression, all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks.

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