A senior U.S. lawmaker says representatives of Elon Musk were granted “full access” to a U.S. Treasury payments system used to disperse trillions of dollars to Americans each year, and warned that Musk’s access to the system poses a “national security risk.”
Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a post on Bluesky on Saturday that sources told his office Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave Musk’s team, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, authorization to access the highly sensitive Treasury system on Friday. The authorization comes following a standoff earlier in the week, in which the Treasury’s highest-ranking career official left the department following requests from Musk’s team for access to the system.
“Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk’s own companies. All of it,” wrote Wyden in the post, referring to DOGE’s access.
The New York Times also reported that Bessent granted DOGE access to the Treasury’s payment system on Friday. One of the DOGE representatives granted access is said to be Tom Krause, the chief executive of Cloud Software Group, which owns Citrix and several other companies. Krause did not return TechCrunch’s request for comment. A spokesperson for the Treasury did not comment when emailed Saturday.
This is the latest effort by Musk and his associates to take over the inner workings of the U.S. federal government following President Trump’s return to office on January 20. Following his inauguration, Trump immediately ordered Musk to begin making widespread cuts to federal government spending.
The system run by the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service controls the disbursements of around $6 trillion in federal funds to American households, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, tax refunds, and payments to U.S. federal employees and contractors, according to a letter written by Wyden and sent to Bessent a day earlier. Access to the payments system was historically limited to a few staff because it contains personal information about millions of Americans who receive payments from the federal government, per the Times.
According to Wyden’s letter, the payments system “simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy.”
In his letter, Wyden said he was concerned that Musk’s extensive business operations in China “endangers U.S. cybersecurity” and creates conflicts of interest that “make his access to these systems a national security risk.”
Last year, the Biden administration blamed China for a series of intrusions targeting U.S. critical infrastructure, the theft of senior American officials’ phone records during breaches of several U.S. phone and internet giants, and a breach of the Treasury’s own systems late last year. Wyden, also a long-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said it was “unusual to be granting access to sensitive systems to an individual with such significant business interests in China.”
Several other federal departments are under scrutiny by DOGE, including the federal government’s own human resources department, known as the Office of Personnel Management.
Reuters reported on Friday that Musk’s representatives locked out career civil servants from computer systems, which contain the personal data and human resources files of millions of federal employees. The OPM was hacked in 2015, which the U.S. government later attributed to China, resulting in the theft of personnel records on more than 22 million U.S. government employees, including staff with security clearances.