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National Debt

Musk-led DOGE has access to the U.S. Treasury’s payment system. What will they do with it?

Kai Ryssdal and Maria Hollenhorst Feb 3, 2025
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Demonstrators gather outside U.S. Agency for International Development headquarters in support of USAID funding. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Image
National Debt

Musk-led DOGE has access to the U.S. Treasury’s payment system. What will they do with it?

Kai Ryssdal and Maria Hollenhorst Feb 3, 2025
Heard on:
Demonstrators gather outside U.S. Agency for International Development headquarters in support of USAID funding. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Image
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Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent granted the Department of Government Efficiency, the task force led by billionaire Elon Musk, access to a critical federal government payment system. 

The Bureau of the Fiscal Service disburses roughly 88% of all federal payments, totaling around $5.4 trillion in fiscal year 2023, according to the agency’s website. A senior Treasury official left the agency after a confrontation with Musk’s team on Friday. 

“Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project and a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, about the role of this payment system and how control over it could threaten the economy. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. 

Kai Ryssdal: The Bureau of the Fiscal Service. What, just so everybody understands, does it do?

Wendy Edelberg: It is the part of our government that makes sure all the money gets to the right place, all the money coming into the federal government from our tax payments, and all the money, most of the money, coming out of the federal government for payments for Social Security benefits, payment to doctors who are treating patients on Medicaid and Medicare, payments to agencies. It is like our huge checkbook.

Ryssdal: All right, so on a scale of like 1 to 10, your level of concern about this, please, with untrained and unprofessional people in charge of this account.

Edelberg: I mean, 10. So it’s not that Elon Musk and the people who work with Elon Musk are the first people to worry about the integrity of this system. Congress has worried about this, and it’s passed legislation to improve the system. There are a lot of very responsible eyes on this system making sure it works well, and so having just folks willy-nilly with their hands at the dials — no, that is not responsible.

Ryssdal: I’ll point out here that we have been since the 21st of January, I believe, in what the Treasury Department calls extraordinary measures because there is the debt limit. Congress has to figure out what it wants to do about that. And this is the office that, almost literally to the penny, figures out how the United States doesn’t default on its debts. Is that right?

Edelberg: It is. So the way to think about the debt limit, and, you know, we are in a period where the U.S. Treasury is not allowed to increase the amount that it is borrowing. So it’s doing, you know, some payment management to make sure that it always has enough money.

Ryssdal: We last spoke, you and I, when we were doing the show we did on the independence of the Federal Reserve and the importance of that when it comes to monetary policy. And you pointed out that if the Federal Reserve is politically cowed, the entire global economy is at risk. This seems to be somewhat analogous. If the United States government, if we don’t know who’s paying the bills and what bills are being paid because that’s what’s happening here, the global economy, then, is at risk. Is that an overstatement?

Edelberg: If we’re going to worry about the whole global financial system, I am more worried about interest and principal payments on Treasury bonds not being paid on time. I mean, [the U.S. Agency for International Development] has already not received any money since early last week, so there are already payments it looks like being improperly withheld against the wishes of Congress, who enacted laws and appropriated money into USAID. So already there are probably some shenanigans. I wouldn’t worry about the global financial system until we get to a point where somebody decides or somebody threatens that it would be clever if we just didn’t make interest payments to, let’s say, our foreign creditors or something stupid like that.

Ryssdal: Which, honestly, we don’t know, right? 

Edelberg: I mean, what frustrates me to no end is that there are so many people all over the United States who have been worrying for, in fact, decades about the risk of a fiscal crisis, and they’ve just been looking under the wrong lamppost. They’re worried about the risk of a fiscal crisis just from grindingly higher federal borrowing and I think the real risk of a fiscal crisis is political malpractice.

Ryssdal: I paused there, Wendy, because I was looking for a follow-up, but I’m not sure there is one at this point, right? We leave it right there?

Edelberg: I mean, if it’s helpful, I can talk more about how, you know, when it comes to the debt limit, they’re not going to reinvest money in the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund —

Ryssdal: But we just don’t — the point of this entire conversation that you and I are having, and the issue with Musk and his acolytes being in charge of this facility, or at least having the access that we now believe them to have because there’s been no confirmation or statement of fact from anybody, there’s just lots of really good reporting — we just don’t know, right?

Edelberg: That’s right. We have people who are in positions to be theoretically deciding what checks get written and what checks don’t get written based on their own political priorities.

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