Musk says DOGE is halting Treasury payments to US contractors
fortune.com
fortune.com
Musk has shown time and again whether it is legal or not isn’t very important to him. It’s what he can get away with, for how long, and what the possible penalties are.
Edit:
Do not flag this guys, this is our world. It’s very serious.
You don't need a lawyer, you need an exorcist.
If Congress appropriates a specific amount of money for a specific thing, the president has limited power to not spend the money.
But many cases, Congress doesn’t appropriate specific amounts of money for specific things. It appropriates a bunch of money and gives it to agencies and department. That leaves the president with a lot of discretion in how and whether to spend the money.
It doesn’t help that Congress has been operating under continuing resolutions. That means Congress is shoveling money to the executive branch but hasn’t enacted former appropriations bills for many things.
As to why Musk can do it. Treasury is a department, not even an independent agency. The president runs it, along with the president’s appointee the secretary of treasury. DOGE is an office within the Executive Office of the President. The President can just create offices for executive managers, like Obama did to appoint the first Chief Technology Officer: https://www.theregister.com/2009/04/20/aneesh_chopra_us_cto/.
That doesn't give Musk or DOGE authority over it, any more then the dept. of the Interior can control what gets paid..
However, I can't say "Govt by good ole boy network" seems proper - and its really hard to figure out what power/limits/check and balances for all this is... Musk basically took over the IT arm of the executive branch ("U.S. Digital Service") - not sure how that allows him and other people without clearances access to secure data, or to make spending decisions for other groups..
Now, it’s fair to say that Trump and Musk are exploiting the fact that Congress abdicated its “power of the purse” to a great extent by giving the executive a bunch of slush funds instead of making specific appropriations. But that’s Congress’s problem.
Also, Musk has a top secret security clearance. But I assume SSNs aren’t even classified and there’s tons of line employees with access to the databases.
Also, there may not be 'check and balances' but there is certainly procedure - which seems to be why lawsuits were filed. Specifically it appears around: "whether DOGE is a presidential advisory commission obeying federal transparency rules about certain practices, such as disclosure and hiring" and "alleged violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires that "the advisory committee have a fair balance in viewpoints represented, that they do not meet in secret, and that their records and work product be made available for public inspection."
Anyway - guess we'll see how it plays out - but I wish there were some more clear cut explanations about
Apparently some smart lawyer looked at things again, and instead decided to create DOGE within the shell of USDS, in the executive office of the president.
Remember how Israel destroyed Iranian centrifuges with a worm on a USB stick that they just waited for someone to be dumb enough to plug into a government connected intranet?
C'mon man, the people defending Musk's brazen behavior here really need to think long and hard about what they're justifying because the like the guy's cars or rockets, or MAGA politics. This is CRAZY.
And what was so urgent about axing USAID that required this weird process of bypassing all of the normal ways people audit a six trillion dollar payment system? Seriously, what was the hurry?
You don’t think they’re being sloppy and reckless? We literally have critical websites going off line, we have airports like San Carlos losing all their ATCs, we have republicans in Congress confused whe their own constituents lose access to services because of misworded EOs, this is not normal.
We couldn’t have had a report prepared over six months, have Musk go to Congress and testify and show all the waste, and a plan to prioritize the cuts, have an orderly wind down, etc?
The US government isn’t X where you fly in in the middle of the night and are so incompetent you start randomly unplugging servers and have to be frantically rescued by heroic sysadmins.
This is the people’s property, not his. We have three branches of government, due process, checks and balances, we don’t have a dictatorship and frankly everyday this is looking more and more like a soft coup.
The strategy for this administration is to do as much as possible as quickly as possible because they know they'll be challenged and they only have 4 years. The Medicaid site was up the very same day (01/28/25) with no payments missed. And the previous contracting company for San Antonio has been given an extension. Nothing they're doing has been shown to be illegal and what you're describing are pretty minor blips considering the changes they're making.
Yes, it’s the people’s property, being granted to private third parties by the executive branch under block grants from Congress. And the people elected Trump as the President in part based on his promise to scrutinize how unelected civil servants were managing all this. This is the elected leader of the executive branch delegating authority to his agent to regulate performing discretionary functions of the executive branch. That’s responsive government, not dictatorship.
We just had an election where both parties ran on an anti-immigration platform, and the more extreme guy won. If that didn’t result in canceling discretionary grants to refugee resettlement programs that would have meant democracy doesn’t work.
Demanding that someone write a report and have some committee is absurd. You can never change an organization that way. What you’re really demanding is that unelected civil servants be allowed to prioritize what they want instead of what the voters want.
I encourage you to listen to this NYT podcast about immigration: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi.... It details how for decades immigration policy has departed from what Congress actually enacted and what voters wanted. A lot of that was due to state department just doing whatever it wanted—e.g. turning the H1B from a temporary worker program into a vehicle for permanent immigration. That’s a profound failure of democracy.
By having a bunch of unelected non civil servants run rampant? Having a guy who registered as a foreign agent of Turkey (Flynn) tweeting out details in a manner that could put people under threat? What line is there that they would cross that would concern you? If they ordered Muslims to swear loyalty oaths or leave that would be fine with you? Keep in mind in this discussion there is precisely one party that’s been threatened with death by Muslims and it’s not you.
This is where you’re going off the rails. Civil servant is a constitutionally meaningless label. There’s the President, Principal and Inferior Officers, then employees and volunteers with ministerial authority. Civil servant isn’t a special category. It’s not a constitutionally recognized authority that somehow must be protected from the President and his agents.
And to be clear I don’t dislike civil servants. I worked with great civil servants at FCC. But their job is to do what the elected President and confirmed appointees say. There’s great civil servants, and there’s crappy ones. A genius from SpaceX is probably substantially smarter and more diligent than the average.
> What line is there that they would cross that would concern you?
The only “line” that’s been crossed is an imaginary one between different categories of unelected employees whose authority derives entirely from the elected president and senate confirmed political appointees.
> If they ordered Muslims to swear loyalty oaths or leave that would be fine with you?
Elon is the good guy. He tweeted about NED, which I didn’t know about. Their web page crows about helping to overthrow democracy the government in Bangladesh. When I told my dad about it—who has been a USAID contractor his whole career—he was like “yeah, NED is a CIA front.” He also pointed out that USAID under Samantha Powers has become enormously political and has been turned into a vehicle for destabilizing foreign governments. I hate that’s true—our thanksgivings are literally a USAID reunion. But it’s not surprising that the state department has been using the goodwill of an agency that builds hospitals in Bangladesh to export their crazy ideas around the world.
Muslims should be supporting what Trump and Elon are doing. This is the first break in the bipartisan consensus in favor of American Empire. I grew up listening to complaints about the state department meddling in other countries’ internal affairs. And this is the first chance I’ve seen in my lifetime to fix that.
> A genius from SpaceX is probably substantially smarter and more diligent than the average.
This hardly strikes me as a democratic sentiment or one that has anything to do with Constitutional governance. I went to school with a lot of geniuses, people certainly smarter than your SpaceX employees. I don’t know that then or now I would give them untrammeled run of the government.
> Muslims should be supporting what Trump and Elon are doing. This is the first break in the bipartisan consensus in favor of American Empire.
I seem to remember an anecdote from partition of Bengal about a goat getting its head stuck in a pot and the village headman’s preferred solution being to decapitate the goat.
So did my mom! Elon pushed her over the finish line.
> I have a little trouble believing people like Mike Flynn have their safety and best interests in mind.
I agree. But I think well-intentioned but ignorant moralists are even more dangerous. I’m shocked at how quickly the anti-imperialist left has flipped when State/the CIA put up some rainbow flags.
> This hardly strikes me as a democratic sentiment or one that has anything to do with Constitutional governance.
It’s orthogonal to constitutional governance. If someone isn’t politically accountable (either elected or a political appointee) then I’d rather they be competent than simply long-tenured.
> I seem to remember an anecdote from partition of Bengal about a goat getting its head stuck in a pot and the village headman’s preferred solution being to decapitate the goat.
We will find out.
Useful info. I had forgotten he had that. Considering his 420 romps, it's surprising he retains it because more lowly worms lose theirs on less cause.
But, your assumptions about line employees belies what I think is pretty well established ICT practice in government. If you can read it, your reading is logged. if you can alter it, you're in a small set and it's constrained by training/induction and also very strongly inculcated into "properly"
Just randomly dumping the entire dataset to some disk you have brought in, and telling your wizzkid to look at it bigly, would not fall into usual practices.
If Congress has explicitly appropriated funds for refugee resettlement, then Elon Musk can't decide to just not spend that money because he doesn't like refugee resettlement. See Train v. City of New York.
And Congress didn’t specifically appropriate funds for these payments. They’re coming out of block grants. Congress has the power to appropriate funds for specific purposes that the president can’t block. But often it doesn’t do that.
> We conclude that delays in the obligation and expenditure of DHS's appropriations are programmatic delays, not impoundments. DHS and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) have shown that the use of funds is delayed in order to perform environmental reviews and consult with various stakeholders, as required by law, and determine project funding needs in light of changes that warrant using funds differently than initially planned. As explained below, because the delay here is precipitated by legal requirements,
That's not the same thing as the richest guy in the world going after a refugee charity because a convicted felon and QAnon conspiracy theorist (Flynn) happened to tweet a screenshot of himself searching the government contract database for the word "Lutheran" because for some crazy reason he hates Lutherans or something
Yes, Congress did appropriate some money for the wall, but most of it was entirely at the discretion of the executive. There was a huge court case about it that was rendered moot when Trump lost the election.
Here's what Brett Kavanaugh wrote:
> Like the Commission here, a President sometimes has policy reasons (as distinct from constitutional reasons, cf. infra note 3) for wanting to spend less than the full amount appropriated by Congress for a particular project or program. But in those circumstances, even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the funds. Instead, the President must propose the rescission of funds, and Congress then may decide whether to approve a rescission bill. See 2 U.S.C. § 683; see also Train v. City of New York, 420 U.S. 35, 95 S. Ct. 839, 43 L. Ed. 2d 1 (1975); Memorandum from William H. Rehnquist, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, to Edward L. Morgan, Deputy Counsel to the President (Dec. 1, 1969), reprinted in Executive Impoundment of Appropriated Fun ds: Hearings Before the Subcomm. on Separation of Powers of the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 92d Cong. 279, 282 (1971) (“With respect to the suggestion that the President has a constitutional power to decline to spend appropriated funds, we must conclude that existence of such a broad power is supported by neither reason nor precedent.”)
Does it violate the APA? Possibly. But you can sue under the APA for basically anything. It doesn’t stop administrations—it’s like a company getting sued for breach of contract. You just put the smart lawyers on it and power through. How do you think Biden’s student loan forgiveness happened?
I had a look at the linked article. You are misrepresenting it. Cancelling contracts is not stopping payment. Likewise the OP headline is completely misrepresenting the situation regarding the Treasury as well. I'll address that in a top-level comment.
And if the law gets enforced, won’t the president just pardon Musk?
The only actual meat of this article seems to be this paragraph, about a single contractor whose payments are being cut off:
Musk said DOGE was shutting down payments by the US Department of Health and Human Services to Lutheran Family Services, a faith-based charity that has been providing social services to refugees. HHS and Lutheran Family Services didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Everything else is mostly fluff, but fluff I've reproduced below:
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Elon Musk said his “DOGE team” of government efficiency enforcers is shutting down payments to federal contractors, suggesting that the world’s richest man may have access to sensitive systems used at the US Treasury Department.
“The corruption and waste is being rooted out in real-time,” Musk posted on X, saying officials reporting to his so-called Department of Government Efficiency are “rapidly shutting down” payments to a Lutheran charity.
The Treasury Department didn’t immediately respond to questions about the extent of Musk’s access. President Donald Trump has put the Tesla CEO — and largest donor to his election effort — in charge of an effort to modernize federal information technology.
But Musk seems to be expanding that mandate to include control over financial flows in other parts of the federal government. Top security officials at USAID were placed on leave Saturday after refusing to allow DOGE staffers access to systems at the foreign assistance agency, saying they lacked the required security clearances.
Musk on Sunday called USAID “a criminal organization” that should “die.”
Musk is targeting systems that process tens of billions of dollars in payments for US government agencies and the officials that oversee them. Musk’s statements on Sunday follow last week’s departure of David Lebryk, the Treasury Department’s most senior career official, who had been in charge of payment systems at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service.
Trump gave Musk’s efforts his seal of approval Sunday night. “Elon’s doing a good job,” Trump told reporters Sunday night.
“He’s a big cost cutter,” Trump said. “Sometimes we won’t agree with it and we’ll not go where he wants to go, but I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy, very smart, and he’s very much into cutting the budget of our federal government.”
Senator Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said Friday that he’s been told that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has granted DOGE full access to Treasury’s payment systems.
“Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk’s own companies,” Wyden said on BlueSky, a social media rival to Musk’s X. “All of it.”
Treasury officials have long maintained that its role is to serve as the federal government’s checkbook — and that the decision about whether to approve or deny payment belongs to individual agencies based on funds appropriated by Congress.
“The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups. They literally never denied a payment in their entire career. Not even once,” Musk wrote on X.
Musk said DOGE was shutting down payments by the US Department of Health and Human Services to Lutheran Family Services, a faith-based charity that has been providing social services to refugees. HHS and Lutheran Family Services didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The headline suggests that Treasury payments to contractors are in the process of being halted; presumably blind as to whether services have been rendered or not. However, pavel_lishin points out that presently only one payee is having the relationship terminated. In addition, it is a charity, which means that I suspect that the payment was a recurring grant rendered without expectation of services. The other relationships are presumably being reviewed.