Banking and financial system scholar Nathan Tankus has posted a long, very detailed article on the extreme danger of having Elon Musk and his DOGE shock troops even tinkering with the day-to-day payment system of the U.S. Treasury, the Treasury Fiscal Service.
I try to keep emotion out of this newsletter. I have always tried to write Notes on the Crises in a calm, detached tone so that the information I highlight shines through. However, I must be honest with readers: I’m absolutely terrified…. There is nothing more important on the entire planet than getting Elon Musk and DOGE out of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and allowing career civil service employees to run the Treasury’s internal payments system without capricious and self-serving interference from billionaires and their allies.
The article by Tankus is entitled, Elon Musk Wants to Get Operational Control of the Treasury’s Payment System. This Could Not Possibly Be More Dangerous. You may find it too detailed to read in its entirety, but you should try. And you should insist that anyone in any position of political authority should read it also. Do you know the chairperson of your local Democratic Party? Pass it along to them, and stress how important it is to bring it to the attention of state legislators, state officers, and Congresspeople and Senators.
Tankus warns that
Musk and his cronies are clearly aiming to redesign the payments system to serve their agenda. The most chilling sentence is this one from the Wall Street Journal:
“It couldn’t be determined what DOGE representatives intended to do with their access to the payment system. Musk and his team think the payment system should be overseen by political appointees selected by President Trump, the people said.”
This is not the attitude of people who are trying to simply technocratically make the payment system more “efficient.” They have a very clear and specific agenda, which involves unilaterally cutting spending, particularly spending they perceive to be going to their ideological foes. Is “Wokeness,” the “Green New Deal,” “Marxism,” and “Gender Ideology” going to be the new definition of an “improper payment"?
Tankus notes that there are no safeguards or limits in place on what Musk and DOGE are doing or might do. But the potential for mischief — whether intentional or mistaken — is enormous:
The data the Treasury collects could not possibly be more sensitive. We are talking about hundreds of millions of Social Security numbers, as well as a raft of other specific identifying information….
This system collects between “10,000 – 99,999” social security numbers along with identifying “business” information, including sensitive financial records and “business” bank accounts. Does anyone think that if Musk could get his hands on this information, whether directly or indirectly, he would not use it to go after, say, nonprofits he dislikes? At 3:14am Sunday, Musk pledged to shut down "illegal payments" to Global Refuge, a faith-based organization that exists to provide "safety and support to refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants from across the world." Musk messing with ASAP is no hypothetical at all.
Tankus explains the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and its legacy information systems, which run the day-to-day stream of payments from the national government to everyone and everything. And Tankus draws attention to the incredible danger of Musk and his DOGE accomplices demanding the source code for these legacy information systems.
In some ways, as enormously alarming at this all is, it’s somehow not the biggest concern that I have been thinking about. For the past 36 hours (writing these words at Midnight on Saturday) my mind has returned over and over to the idea that they have been asking for “source code information” to the Treasury’s internal payments system….
COBOL is the lingua franca of mission critical legacy IT in use since the 1960s and too many systems have been too important to abandon it. “Modernization” has instead been built around making COBOL function somewhere besides a mainframe. The “modernization” of the Treasury’s IT payments infrastructure seems to have constituted a combination of rooting out Assembly code and a basically completed transition of “mainframe” COBOL to an “internally-developed RM COBOL” running on Linux servers. RM COBOL is an update on mainframe COBOL “designed for optimum performance and wide portability across a broad diversity of computers and operating systems.” Most notably, the Treasury’s transition to RM COBOL seems to have involved harmonizing more than 30 different COBOL systems which had evolved separately. It was 30 “dialects” they managed to get to speak one standardized language.
Does Elon Musk understand any of this? Does he have any grasp of the scale and complexity he is trying to reach into and exercise “influence”? Currently the most urgent and profound danger is not what he intends to make this sprawling apparatus do. The most immediate danger is what might break in the process of trying to get this apparatus to do what he wants.
At every step of modernizing this system they have run systems concurrently to make sure the “new” functions as well as the old. Redundant systems are only phased out over long time periods after they have enough data on system functioning to feel confident in the “modernized” infrastructure. This is expensive, time consuming and absolutely necessary to make sure this system functions 100% of the time. Elon Musk, however, has never shown respect or understanding of the concept of a mission critical IT system. All he sees is “inefficiency” because he doesn’t understand that there are some things in this world that need to function no matter what and you spend the additional money to make sure it runs, including when it's being updated.
The last paragraph by Tankus is well worth re-reading.
There is nothing more important on the entire planet than getting Elon Musk and DOGE out of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and allowing career civil service employees to run the Treasury’s internal payments system without capricious and self-serving interference from billionaires and their allies. This effort must fail if we are to safeguard any semblance of due process and lawfulness in the executive branch. A vague anonymous promise that DOGE only has “read only” access is not enough. They need to be rooted out so that we can return to the slower moving, less dangerous, “five alarm fire” constitutional crisis we were having as of Friday morning.