25yr Old with Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System
wired.com
wired.com
Concerning
Some tech bros a few inches out of puberty have physical access to the US Treasury on behalf of Elon 'Sieg Heil' Musk; in brazen violation of innumerable laws. Yet, looking at the front page right now, you'd think nothing much was happening. That's insane.
When a community decides to 'look the other way' at events of this magnitude (and even condone them), it's a blazing neon sign of deep and irreversible rot.
It's sad really.
This occurs because government employee Elon Musk is censoring them for talking about his government job and his government co-workers, which also breaks the law that says their identities are public information.
I guess what I'm saying is, spread the news, and if we're lucky and the Redcaps don't burn the Reichstag, you might someday get a few cents out of a class action lawsuit.
So is it System Z?
is this where we are? you literally cannot have even demand trivial operational competency without being called a nazi?
``` “You could do anything with these privileges,” says one source with knowledge of the system, who adds that they cannot conceive of a reason that anyone would need them for purposes of simply hunting down fraudulent payments or analyzing disbursement flow. ```
as a citizen this should concern you.
I've been moderately on board with DOGE's mission as an advisory group. Hell, even with Musk as SGE. But this is batshit fucking crazy. We put entire countries on grey lists because some oligarch's lacky even has read access to their national payments systems. And those governments at least give the lackey a role.
This 25-year old is now a top intelligence target for every agency on the planet. He will probably remain so for the rest of his life. He wasn't elected. The man he is loyal to--who hired him and pays his salary--was never elected. He's so unknown that the first page of search results pulls up unrelated water polo players. Yet he's somehow in a position of, practically speaking, more power than the Federal Reserve?
> We put entire countries on grey lists because some oligarch's lacky even has read access to their national payments systems. And those governments at least give the lackey a role.
Presumably someone else had access to the system before the current changes. What's left to object to? Is ageism appropriate here? Going back to the OP's objection, the whole exercise seems like more partisan hyperbole.
Uhhh, virtually everything is still left? Those regular humdrum protective policies large organizations adopt after they keep getting burned for not having them?
For example, security clearances, and background checks, which aren't so much about morality as to ensure the person has no secrets an enemy can they blackmail them with.
Or what about financial disclosures for conflicts of interest? Then a different person can be tasked with certain projects to avoid unnecessary temptation to peak, leak, or tweak.
> Musk’s DOGE crew lacked high-enough security clearance to access that information, so the two USAID security officials — John Vorhees and deputy Brian McGill — were legally obligated to deny access.
https://fortune.com/2025/02/02/elon-musk-doge-usaid-classifi...
Those people reported to someone elected, or hired by and confirmed by electeds. His age is irrelevant beyond his lack of government, payments or public financial experience.
(You're correct inasmuch as these systems should not have been built to allow such unauditable access.)
> it doesn't justify the persistent reducto-ad-hitlerum
Totally agree. Some people have been at Defcon 1 since 2016. They're now suffering the fate of the boy who called wolf. But let's remember: in the end, the wolf was real.
This time, the boy isn't guarding his personal flock. He's guarding ours. This kid in the Treasury is fucking with our government and our system of money.
We need to be hypervigilant, specifically, to ensuring we know what these people are looking at, where they're storing it, what they're changing and what they're deleting. If we learn there's fuckery afoot, that calls for breaking norms, conventions and possibly small laws to counter that. Given the political cards, that must happen at the state level. (This is too new. I have no suggestions.)
> the whole exercise seems like more partisan hyperbole
I don't think so. There are laws with teeth this man is violating. The Privacy Act and FISMA were mentioned. If he's accessing anything related to tax returns, that's super criminalised, potentially beyond the reach of a pardon since those records include state filings.
Potentially more problematically, it may not be possible for him to easily prove he didn't fuck with anything illegally. That shouldn't be enough to convict. But it's almost certainly enough to prosecute, if only to produce a public record showing there wasn't evidence that it happened.
If we are to be balanced in our consideration here, it would be reasonable to consider the possibility that the established media voices may be objecting to an entrenched network of corruption unwinding. These are the stated reasons for the audit. It is worth at least considering them at face value. Reasonable people should be able to debate these things without resorting to reducto-ad-hitlerum.
Given that none of the coverage presented by the sources has even considered the opposition's argument, it isn't unreasonable to characterize it as unbalanced partisanship. Yes, a young engineer has access to this data. Previously an unnamed engineer appointed by an unelected bureaucrat also had access. Yet the partisans were not invoking crass analogies at that time. Nobody was raising the alarms about IRS agents or Treasury employees having access to the same data. Regardless of where we are on the partisan spectrum, we should be able to recognize this as hypocritical and more than a little bit suspicious.
Many feel lots of things. If this is acceptable then the next Democrat who wins Presidency should go in and delete federal leases they don't like. (More realistically: delete all the student loan records. I don't even think those touch state laws, so you'd be fully cleared with a pardon.)
> it would be reasonable to consider the possibility that the established media voices may be objecting to an entrenched network of corruption unwinding
Not really. Or maybe we see the problem with having a rando with read-write access to sensitive public infrastructure.
> Reasonable people should be able to debate these things without resorting to reducto-ad-hitlerum
You're the only one bringing up Hitler in this thread.
> none of the coverage presented by the sources has even considered the opposition's argument
Not everything needs to be both sided. This isn't a partisan issue. It's not even binary--plenty of people agree with DOGE having some access but not this.
> Previously an unnamed engineer appointed by an unelected bureaucrat also had access
An unnamed engineer hired by an unelected bureucrat. (After being screened by another group. Subject to conflicts and financial-disclosure rules to an agency.) Such bureaucrat eventually reporting to someone appointed by an elected and confirmed by other electeds.
The people in this chain who report to Bessent did not clear this access. Based on Bessent's statements, he didn't clear read-write access. Legally speaking, this man breached our payments system.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42929327
EDIT:
"Bessent tells lawmakers Musk’s DOGE does not control Treasury payments system "
>POLITICO reported Saturday that Bessent signed off on a plan to give “read-only” access to the payment system to a team led by Tom Krause, the CEO of Cloud Software Group, who is now working for the Treasury Department and serves as a liaison to Musk’s DOGE group that operates out of the United States Digital Service.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/03/bessent-musk-doge-t...
EDIT: Bessent's statement about Krause predates this story about Elez. Bessent doesn't know what he's talking about or Elez is acting illegally. Which one do you think Bessent is going to go with?
If Elon's allegations that media groups like Vox and others have been eating public funds via USAID are true, I doubt there will be much coverage here at HN. We will see.
We're at the point where we must agree to disagree. I've stated that I believe the allegations should be considered at face value, if we are to continue in good faith.
I do too. We also know, now, that it will be almost impossible to prove the evidence hasn't been tampered with. Holding anyone accountable is going to be challenging.
> cautiously optimistic that the 3T deficit may be tackled
I'm not. The deficit has been blown out by every President since Clinton. We haven't even started counting the bills from the trade war [1]. (And we're still in the kiddie pool with Canada.)
> If Elon's allegations that media groups like Vox and others have been eating public funds via USAID are true
That will be something he could have learned through less-extreme means.
For what it's worth, I don't think Elez was meant to have write access. I don't think he's changed any data. It was a fuckup.
And fuckups have costs. Musk will need to settle political battles. (Trump making a public staement about Musk's power is telling [2].) Elez is fucked, legally, but let's be honest, nobody cares about him. The litigation being brought against DOGE's actions just got evidence administrative procedure isn't being followed; a likely and terrible endgame there is union and NGO lawyers getting de facto judgement power.
This news should be broadly infuriating. If you hate DOGE, it's an illegal expansion of power. If you love DOGE, it's undermining its credibility.
(Cleverly, Musk had Elez put his fingerprints down and Trump, in turn, can throw Musk under the bus when the next fuckup hurts someone.)
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/03/trump-trade-farm-ai...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-03/trump-say...
It isn't immediately clear what kind of system is in use. There may be backups which could conclusively prove files had been edited.
> a likely and terrible endgame there is union and NGO lawyers getting de facto judgement power.
They were always going to fight on every possible avenue. How much do anonymous press leaks really mean here?
If the allegations are untrue there is obviously no story.
At the top of the thread you said "even if we accept all of this..." I took "this" to refer to the allegations. We're exploring that branch.
> were always going to fight on every possible avenue. How much do anonymous press leaks really mean here?
Everyone should. The point is if the allegations are true, they're persuasive to a judge. If I commit a crime on your property, about the best thing you could do for me is turn the place upside down before the police arrive.
The only possible way for that to happen requires that Congress passes laws to either (A) spends way less on things (B) collect way more tax. I see no reason to think they'll manage that without substantial electoral reform.
OK, technically it could happen if Trump commits more crimes and usurps the government, but I'm sure you don't want that.
________
> If Elon's allegations that media groups like Vox and others have been eating public funds via USAID are true, I doubt there will be much coverage here at HN. We will see.
In this specific case, he is lying. In the general case, he lies a lot, from self-driving-next-year promises to Tesla owners, to faking his world-rank in a video game. You should stop giving him the benefit of the doubt by now.
To wit:
> [Musk] Claiming USAID funds [Bill] Kristol through [Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors] is like saying two organizations are connected because they both use the same bank. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how charitable giving works – or more likely, a deliberate misrepresentation.
> But Musk claims he’s stopping USAID from funding Kristol based on this functionally illiterate conspiracy theory, and we’re going to hear more idiots insisting he actually stopped the thing that anyone who knew anything about how charitable giving works would know is untrue.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/03/the-twitter-files-playbo...
However I'm having trouble tracking how it relates to this thread, and what you are trying to assert by referencing it.
No it isn't. It's not an audit, it's a hostile takeover. An actual audit of the federal government would have involved standards, qualifications, security clearances, and other institutional infrastructure, and stringent controls to avoid conflicts of interest. If you don't see a conflict of interest with the richest man in the world sending a team of kids to take over the main systems in the treasury and personnel departments of the federal government then I envy your child-like innocence.
Reasonable people should be able to debate these things without resorting to reducto-ad-hitlerum.
There was a clear roadmap published by the Heritage Foundation before the election detailing plans for a hostile takeover, and events so far are wholly consistent with that - unsurprising, since one of its lead authors is nominated for a cabinet position.
Also, this is all happening under the aegis of a guy who marked inauguration day by throw Roman salutes to the crowd, a gesture beloved by neo-nazis. At least one of this young engineers barging his way into secure high value systems is a big fan of neo-nazi Nick Fuentes, and I see no reason to think that having neo-nazis in charge is likely to end better than it did with the original version.