Treasury official retires after clash with DOGE over access to payment system | Hacker News Reader

Treasury official retires after clash with DOGE over access to payment system

arstechnica.com

86 pointsrediguanayum19 comments

I'm going to guess the the Secure Payment System mentioned in the article is this: https://fiscal.treasury.gov/sps/

As it says on the SPS website, the they use PKI! ... Wait a tick, is that what Elon wants access to? So he can read/write the federal account ledgers? Or perhaps Elon wants to control the CA behind it. The article mentions very select few personnel have access, which sounds like this... Yeah that might be enough of a reason for a long time, very senior federal employee to call it quits all of sudden, so as to not be the stooge that gives away the keys to Elon (particularly the CA keys). (Pure uneducated speculation)

I'm going to guess the explainer for the office(s) in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_the_Fiscal_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Fiscal_Service

Sounds like Wyden is at least asking questions, now that someone at Treasury has fallen on their sword: https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wyden-demands-...

The "retirement" timing here is interesting. OPM's own "apply for retirement" forms state to supply the filled out form to one's HR office at least 60 days before one's retirement date to give time for it to be processed by HR and OPM.

So either this official got the worlds fastest processing of a retirement application through their HR department and through OPM, or he was already retiring on Jan 31 anyway and the timing is just a coincidence.

It is common in federal service to retire on the last day of the month because retirement pensions are paid on the first day of each month, so one has the smallest 'gap' in payments by doing so.

I certainly hope the choice wasn't "resign now or be involved in the paper trail".

I know in my State, it's not too unusual to retire early by using accrued leave to push out the actual retirement date. If he had 60 ( minus weekend ) days of leave, he could "retire" same day.

Is Elon trying to Twitterize the federal government? Is it really the case that renaming the Digital Services agency to DOGE allows him to do whatever he wants? https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/31/elon-musk-is-reportedly-ta...

Shouldn't an oversight group have read access to the Government's accounts payable data? Congress ought to have that data. For any recipient over $1 million, it ought to be public.

Congress has the data. There's even current public sources for monthly and daily ledger values (and a live API) at https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/reports-statements/ and https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/

There's zero reason to do all this for read only access, I strongly feel he's pushing for the CA keys behind the system that would allow write access to the ledgers.

This is what has been unclear so far. What kind of access is the DOGE seeking? Read access seems within the scope of their "mandate" to audit spending. But if they are going to insert themselves into the process or start blocking payments, that's much more concerning.

I would hope there would be some check and balance, or a transparent procedure, or even a paper trail involved here. /s

(Who am I kidding? FOIA offices are probably going to be slashed; independent Inspector Generals have been forced out.)

It’s going to be really funny if Trump realizes that maybe he didn’t read all of DOGE’s fine print, and gets buyer’s remorse because he’s the one on the hook for crashing the economy, not Musk. Well, it won’t be funny at all actually.

It will be hilarious for China though, you can take heart in that.

>> "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 was quoted as saying. "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."

Buffett likes to say "never bet against America". It really feels like this time it may actually be different. All of recent actions from Trump / Elon reeks grift, corruption and idiocy.

What I'm really really curious about, is who's playing who ? Elon is playing Trump or the other way around ?

I likes Peter Schiff's take on DOGE and Trump's meme coin. He said for all the finger pointing Trump did at Biden for corruption, the only thing DOGE has done is increase the efficiency with which anyone can bribe Trump. And private or state actor can pay him off publicly and immediately through his meme coin.

Can some Trumper explain to us all why it's a good idea for Elon (the biggest capitalist in the world) to have access to all of the Treasury's data?

Naively it seems corrupt.

I question how he can be involved in a government that claims China is the number one threat while he directs a company that has to play nice with the CCP to keep access to their markets, Tesla.

I am decidedly opposed to this, but since you didn't get an answer, I'll try to steelman one.

It gives him the ability to excise unwise spending. He can figure out where the money is going, and if it's being spent badly, he can stop it (possibly directly, possibly through pre-existing channels). It avoids getting caught up in the bureaucracy, which cannot fix itself but needs to be replaced from outside.

I'm fairly certain that this is not in fact what is going to happen, and that the real goal is to gather data on his enemies and harass them. But we'll see who's right soon enough.

Never mind the biggest capitalist in the world – it's the glaring conflicts of interest that smack me in the head here. I grew up in a middle-income Southeast Asian country that built a whole lot of infrastructure projects while I was growing up and this is _still_ an absurd level of corruption to me.

Stop payments to his competitors?

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