5 questions about the access of Doges about federal payment systems

Questions have how much access Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) have on the personal data and the sensitive federal payment systems of the Americans.

Shortly after President Trump took up his office, Musk put members of his cost reduction committee into the finance department with eyes to the Fiskalddienst office: the agency responsible for processing federal payments and income.

The fiscal service is functionally the department of the federal government payable and takes care of many trillion dollars transactions per year, including social security and medicare payments.

Reports from Doge employees who access important payment systems and force veterans of the Ministry of Finance for three decades triggered the alarm for democrats, career employees and financial experts.

The Department of the White House and the Ministry of Finance claims that the administration only carries out a review of the fiscal service and that Doge’s employees are only able to change, not to change, and payments are made through the agency.

However, internal e -mails in the Ministry of Finance show that the chief of staff of the Ministry of Finance has urged to use access to the payment system in order to freeze payments for the US Agency for International Development (USA), as can be seen from the New York Times.

And Musk called for greater control over the payment system for the Ministry of Finance on Thursday, shortly after the Ministry of Justice had agreed to limit the number of employees associated with Doge who can access such programs. The order came in response to a lawsuit submitted by several government unions against the financial department.

“Billions of taxpayers’ money for well -known fraudulent companies are still approved by the Ministry of Finance,” wrote Musk on X, the social media platform, which he bought in 2022.

“That has to stop now!”

Here you will find five big questions about access to Doge’s federal payment system.

How much access does Dogy have?

The White House has refused several reports that Doge employees have received extensive access to fiscal service systems.

On Tuesday, WIRED MAGAZINE reported that a 25-year-old former musk employee named Marko Elez Administrative “Privileges () the ability to not only read but write code, on two treasury systems that as a pamemation manager (pam) The secure payment system (PLC) is known. SPS is how the household service receives payments and Pam spends it.

Elez and Tom Krause, CEO of the Cloud software group, were the two special federal employees who were made accessible to the tax service as part of the orders of the Ministry of Justice, but not to edit or make any changes to the system.

However, Elez resigned on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal unveiled a number of racist social media contributions from a social media account, which has been deleted since then, confirmed the White House.

Finance Minister Scott Bessent said on Thursday that the Doge team did not “tinker” with the system.

“There is no tinkering with the system. They are writing -protected, ”he said. “You are looking for. You cannot make any changes. It is an operating program that suggests improvements. “

“You have no ability to change the system. I have no ability to grant this change, ”he added.

The Press spokesman for the White House, Karoline Leavitt, told the reporters on Wednesday that DOG engineers are not allowed to write a new code for payment systems.

A spokesman for the White House previously told the Hill that Dogge was the promise of President Trump to make the government liable for accounting and to restore the management of tax money.

What is the purpose of access?

Both Trump and Musk promised for months before and after the 2024 elections that the billionaire would make aggressive efforts in order to reduce both the size of the federal government and the amount of money that he spends.

Doges Interest in the Treasury payment system has triggered the concerns of the Trump -Northern Names for one -sided blocking of payments that have already been approved by the congress and signed by the President.

Musk claimed that the fiscal service had processed billions of dollars of fraudulent payments that should not have been sent. However, experts say that the budgetary service has no legal authority to block payments that are ordered according to the law to process.

“The Bureau of Fiscal Service is not a political job among political representatives. It is completely mechanical: agencies tell the office that receives tax credits, who receives grants, can pay the contractors – and they receive the money, ”said Natasha Sarin, professor at the Yale Law School and a former official of the Treasury Department of Biden Treasury .

Sarin said that she could not imagine a legitimate reason that the political appointments would like to gain access to the payment system and that it is briefly operation the path of the intended treasury operations.

Before the resignation of Elez, the White House had refused to comment on whether it had read and wrote access to the basic code or what technical changes were made to the treasury PAM and SPS platforms.

The ongoing operations of Doge can be considered annoying by the persons enshrined in the Germans bureaucracy, added a spokesman for the White House.

The journalist and the economic researcher Nathan Tankus informed the Hill that Doge’s employees may be aimed at another platform, which is referred to as automated standard application for payments (ASAP) and is partly used to pay for non -profit organizations.

“ASAP is the system you would use if you want to address certain government agencies in the grants and other payments that you do, and if you also target particularly unfavorable non -profit organizations,” he said.

“After my reporting, you have access, technical details and receive data from ASAP, ASAP, PAM and another system called ITS, the International Ministry of Finance,” he added. It is the fiscal service system for international payments.

Is your personal data safe?

Even with writing-protected access, Doge officials have access to the financial information of the Americans, including social security numbers.

“We talk about the social security numbers and private information about every single American,” said Sarin.

Causes regarding the personal data were the focus of the Federal Union’s lawsuit submitted against the Ministry of Finance, which led to the DOJ arrangement restricted Doge’s access.

The unions accused Besser, not properly disclosed the allies of Musk sensitive personal and financial information.

“The extent of the penetration into the privacy of the individual is massive and unprecedented,” the unions wrote. “Millions of people cannot avoid participating in financial transactions with the federal government, and therefore cannot avoid that their sensitive personal and financial information will be maintained in state records.”

The DOJ order approved by Richter Colleen Kollar-Kotelly will hold on Thursday morning, while the judge is considering whether he granted the unions an injunction.

Is it legal to get such access?

The trade union’s lawsuit is part of several legal challenges for the participation of DOGES in federal payment systems.

“People who have to share information to the federal government should not be forced to share information with Elon Musk or his” Doge “. And the federal law says that it does not have to be, ”says a complaint that the Allianz for retired Americans and other groups submitted.

The Labor Federation AFL-CIO and some of his connected unions of the public sector also sued Damage on Wednesday to receive access to the Ministry of Labor.

A spokesman for the White House informed the Hill that the efforts of Doge are made in line with the federal law of people with adequate security checks, which they described as employees of the responsible agencies in contrast to external consultants.

What is the global payments at stake?

As with many government computer code, a large part of the fiscal service payment system is written in Cobol, an old programming language that is not compatible with many more modern software.

Some of them are even written in the assembly conversation, an even more fundamental computer code that corresponds to binary one-au instructions of the machine code.

Experts describe these systems as rather fragile and easy to screw up.

“You make a wrong train and could easily break this system,” said Tankus. “Everything now has an enormous operational IT risk.”

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