A government watchdog is to launch an inquiry into security over the US treasury’s payments system as a judge on Friday considered whether access by Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to the highly sensitive data base was unconstitutional.
Amid mounting court cases concerning Doge’s activities, the treasury department’s inspector general said it would launch an audit after Democrats complained about the access gained to a 25-year-old Musk associate, Marko Elez, who was briefly granted edit access within the system, meaning he had the potential to change entries. The access was later rescinded by an interim court ruling.
The payment system contains the personal details of millions of Americans and disburses trillions of dollars to federal government programmes.
Musk, the billionaire owner of Tesla and SpaceX, has been tasked by Trump to slash government spending by targeting alleged waste and fraud and has upended large swaths of the federal bureaucracy, cancelling contracts, stopping spending programs and throwing thousands of staff out of work.
Loren Sciurba, the treasury’s deputy inspector general, said the audit would review the past two years of the system’s transactions to examine Musk’s claim that his team has uncovered evidence of billions of dollars of fraudulent payments.
She said the audit – launched in response to demands from the Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden – would begin immediately and take until August to complete.
Its launch coincided with a judge in Washington considering a legal suit lodged by Democratic attorneys general from 14 states, arguing that Doge’s work was illegal on the alleged grounds that Trump violated the US constitution by creating a federal government department without congressional approval.
The attorneys general argue that Musk has exercised “virtually unchecked power” by entering government agencies and ordering sweeping cuts without oversight or authorization from Congress.
USAid, the government foreign assistance agency, has been shuttered on his authority and its workforce put on leave, although a judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to temporarily lift the funding freeze it has imposed on the agency’s humanitarian work.
The suit, led by New Mexico’s justice department, alleges that Doge has “unraveled federal agencies, accessed sensitive data, and caused widespread disruption for state and local governments, federal employees, and the American people”.
The attorneys general asked the court to order Musk to identify how “any data obtained through unlawful agency access was used” and to destroy any “unauthorised access in his or Doge’s possession”. They called on the court to bar Musk and his team from stopping the disbursement of public funds, cancelling contracts and dismantling agencies.
The hearing was due to take place after Musk said the US needed to “delete entire agencies” to eliminate waste.
A separate hearing in a court in New York was due over whether to extend a temporary block on the Doge team entering the payments system that was imposed in an interim ruling last Saturday by Judge Paul Englemayer. Musk called for Englemayer’s impeachment after that ruling, while JD Vance, the vice-president, wrote in a social media most that judges were not allowed to interfere with a president’s “legitimate power” – a view contested by most constitutional law experts.
Swingeing cuts continued apace despite the plethora of legal challenges. Federal agency heads were ordered to fire most recent hires who have not completed their probation period – a move likely to affect about 200,000 workers, the Washington Post reported.
The treasury department audit coincided with a call from Chris Murphy, Democratic senator for Connecticut, for an official investigation into the “legality and scope” of Musk’s penetration of the federal bureaucracy.
“Musk and his aides are subject to various conflict of interest statutes which prohibit federal employees from participating in matters that impact their own financial interests,” Murphy wrote to the US government comptroller general, Eugene Dodaro.
He added: “It is imperative the public understands whether Musk and his aides have complied with the law and whether highly sensitive data could be at risk if accessed by private actors who seek to benefit from the information illegally, or worse, by foreign adversaries who wish to attack this country.”
Despite the rising resistance to its activities, the US armed services were preparing a list of weapons systems to be cut in preparation for Doge casting its gaze over the Pentagon, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Members of Musk’s team were expected to visit the Pentagon on Friday. “People are offering up things sacrificially, hoping that will prevent more cuts,” a defence official told the Journal.
The army was said to be volunteering cutting outdated drones and vehicles, while the navy is proposing cuts to frigates and littoral combat ships.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
