The single weirdest thing Elon Musk has done is to take control of the Treasury's payment system. What's the point? Every dollar the federal government spends goes through a bunch of steps to make sure it's legitimate, approved, and due for payment. After that's all done, Treasury cuts the checks. It's a purely mechanical process. "Control" of the system gets you nothing.
So what is Musk up to? The conspiracy theorists think Musk is planning to insert himself in this process and simply halt any check writing he disapproves of. But this isn't just illegal, it's wildly illegal. There's just no way Musk could be thinking of doing this.
So what is he doing? Here's a guess: Musk's minions are writing some kind of custom reporting system. If you want to track literally every cent the government spends, this is the place to do it. Nor would Musk be stopped by the fact that the system is probably written in some ancient programming language like COBOL or PL/I. Modern AI is great at decrypting and modifying code, and while it prefers contemporary languages like Python or C, I'll bet Claude and GPT-4 can do a credible job of hacking their way through a big, boiling pot of COBOL spaghetti.
So then, what does Musk plan to do with his nifty new reporting app? Beats me. I imagine he's designing it to notify him of discrepancies of some kind. Or to track down every last DEI-related payment. Or create God's own pivot table of regulatory spending.
I mean, who knows? But Musk figures that knowledge is power, and he's not wrong about that. The Treasury payment system might be the ideal high ground for Musk to build a personal source of spending knowledge that's independent of having to ask OMB or agency heads or anyone else anytime he wants to know something. If I were him, this is absolutely the kind of thing I'd be highly motivated to do.
If this is the case, Musk is keeping it hush-hush because he doesn't want anyone to know he's building this independent power center. But there's nothing illegal about it as long as the president and Treasury secretary both approve.
Insurrection is illegal. Rape is illegal. Any illegal Musk activities will be pardoned.
it will be worse than you think.
They won't be prosecuted. Or if prosecuted won't get past the first right wing judge that picks up the case.
It’s already considerably worse than I thought.
A Tesla engineer and ally of Elon Musk appeared undeterred by laws that could stop their work at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, an entity Congress hasn't funded that was created by Donald Trump.
In a leaked audio tape obtained by 404Media, Musk's aims were questioned by staffers aware of the legal restrictions on government work.
Musk pal Thomas Shedd, who now leads the General Services Administration's Technology Transformation Services was told by employees that turning the U.S. government over to artificial intelligence to "further identify individuals" was "an illegal task."
The call was previously reported by WIRED that Shedd promised, “Things are going to get intense."
He went on to discuss creating a kind of “AI coding agents," which would write the software "for many different agencies and would be trained in part on existing government contracts, larger scale automations of government, and, critically, changes to Login.gov"
"Just like a fun one that we've been thinking through with Login, specifically in TTS is, as most of you know, Login can't access government information on individuals. And so there's no connection that Login has with social security or any other government system, even though we're part of the government,” Shedd said. “And so part of one of the things to work through is how do we make it so that those agencies that has that information of very secure APIs that can be leveraged by login to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud?”
During the Q&A, an employee informed Shedd that the Privacy Act forbids agencies from sharing personal information without consent.
“I think we were on the topic of login aggregating data. It's an illegal task,” the employee asked in a written submission. “The Privacy Act forbids agencies sharing personal information without consent.” But Shedd said they "should still push forward and see what we can do."
but sure
no biggie
that all sounds pretty goofy, and AI is not going to refactor us out of the existing US codebase
Paul Krugman has a good Substack discussion on this (https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkrugman/p/what-the-musk-is-happening?r=2sauq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email).
His educated guess is that the "Muskovites" may be trying to muck around with the COBOL code to make it work "better," or even replace it with something cooler. Or create some kind of portal into the code so they could monkey around with it if BossElon finds some other agency that "needs to die."
Josh Marshall is reporting that Elon's minion Markos Elez has already made changes to the payment code base which appear to allow for selective blocking of payments. He was aided in this by programmers who maintain the code base because they were afraid he might cause major outages if his changes weren't supervised.
I am as far from a conspiracy theorist as anyone can be, but Palantir's stock went up 24% today. I am sure they would know what to do will all that data. Wonder if any 19-25 year old programmers had deep out-of-the-money calls on Palantir. I wonder if Peter Thiel and Elon Musk know each other.
Peter Thiel bought Musk's penny ante online bank (X.com) and folded it into PayPal. Musk worked there for some time before Thiel got tired of him pushing for a full service online bank and changing the name to from PayPal to X and booted him out. Then he went on to steal Tesla from its founders.
Kevin seems remarkably naive here, actually thinking Musk has any interest in government efficiency.
Kevin seems remarkably naive here, actually thinking Musk has any interest in government efficiency.
I've read numerous times that Musk is an Ayn Rand devotee, so, it doesn't seem a stretch to posit that he's a fiscal hawk who valorizes government efficiency.
The naïveté here belongs to Musk, not Kevin, because the former seems remarkably ignorant to the reality that it the aging of the population combined with past tax cuts that is mainly driving debt accumulation. "Efficiencies" aren't going to have a major impact on the deficit. We need to either cut entitlements or raise taxes. Them's our choices. Elon's a bright enough fellow (if you discount his lack of public policy knowledge), but he can't make math go away.
Randians don't valorize efficiency - they simply want to destroy government.
I guess that's efficient in the sense that something that doesn't exist can't be wasteful.
Also, the government is already pretty goddamn efficient.
That Elon is interested in government efficiency is one of those tales that is told without any support or evidence that it is true.
It's strange to assume that Elon is super smart, interested in govt efficiency but also so naive that he doesn't understand the government efficiency project that he is undertaking. These pieces don't really fit together to make a coherent story....
That's plausible. One of Musk's 20 year olds has admin rights on the system and is making fundamental changes to it.
But that also means Musk is opening up a potential back door for nefarious actors.
I would very much like to see that pasty white Nazi fish belly go to prison.
I've said this before, but I think he wants to give his AI company an advantage using data that nobody else has, as well as potentially entrench himself in the government hard enough that it's hard to dislodge his companies later even if partisan control of government changes. Sort of like how SpaceX is so important to national security-related space operations.
“Musk's minions are writing some kind of custom reporting system.”
This is definitely the kind of thing employees with 35 years of experience at an agency abruptly resign over rather than give permission, as David Lebryk, Acting Fiscal Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, did on Friday night. What a drama queen Mr Lebryk was, quitting without even giving notice in the middle of the night over a simple request to create a new reporting tool.
Totally makes sense.
/s
This is an extremely naive and technically illiterate answer.
AI tools are NOT yet good enough to sift through undocumented legacy COBOL programs that require a huge amount of institutional knowledge to make sense of.
Musk has been openly threatening to block payments he doesn't like. He's already managed to shut down USAID and CFPB.
The kids watched "Dave" one too many times.
I don't buy this take. Take a look at this publicly available data:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/tracking-federal-expenditures-in-real-time/
It shows that USAID, which became a conservative bugaboo on (checks notes) January 27, ceased receiving payments from the Treasury after (checks notes) January 27.
So... they're not just doing data collection here. They're doing the flagrantly illegal stopping-payments thing. There will be more of this.
My bet is: kind of like those very misleading and pretty much bogus repots on "government waste" that used to collect the most silly-sounding scientific research and so on and tell the public what a waste it was, this time Musk will find some scapegoat program, tell X they're all illegally stealing money / anti-American propagandists / child molesters / whatever, and then block payments to them and dare the Democrats or the public to side with the pariah. It'll be great. Courts may enjoin, but Musk now has the power to act faster than courts issuing injunctions.
And if he loses in court, so what? He still gets to make his point and drive the narrative, and that assumes the court order is fully obeyed...
The link shows that the treasury makes public the daily payments in each transaction category. In fact, the treasury puts out more reports and data than anybody but the wonkiests of wonks would know what to do with: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/
There may be additional reports which are not public. So I’m not sure that (1) Elon needs more reports than or already available, or (2) that the treasury couldn’t or wouldn’t provide additional reports if Elon finds the existing ones insufficient.
There is a very interesting thread up on Bluesky with Mark Cuban asking if anyone knows the payment processes. Some great info.
https://bsky.app/profile/mcuban.bsky.social/post/3lhflewoqrk2z
Anyone on Bluesky should follow Cuban, he's one of us except with lots of zeros on his bank account.
"But this isn't just illegal, it's wildly illegal. There's just no way Musk could be thinking of doing this."
How do you get from the first sentence to the second? What does one have to do with the other? What incentive does he have to follow the law? How do you think Musk might be held accountable if he doesn't? The Justice Department? The Supreme Court? He owns one and will ignore the other (in the unlikely event that it chastises him).
SCOTUS has given the president blanket immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in office. Sure, they're illegal, but he can't be held accountable for them except by impeachment, and Trump will just pardon anyone who commits crimes on his behalf. It's a Zen koan of sorts -- if it's wildly illegal but you can't be held accountable for doing it, does it still make a sound? Or something like that.
A custom reporting system? That's your theory? Why does he have to go about the task in this way, instead of going through the kinds of steps which involve security vetting for the very young loyal coders you hired to supervise the process, or a full-on federal bidding process? Why would employees be leaking that his guy at the Treasury wanted to put in a system to block payment on any item? And if this is all about cleaning up old COBOL code using AI (which, I remind you, is not nearly at 100% yet), why would a smart man (and you claim Musk is one) go about the task in this way? Surely you'd duplicate the code for Treasury's system, install it on a sandboxed system in the same building, and let AI go to town on the code, then test it with the same data inputs as the functional system and see if the outputs are what you expect.
What you WOULDN'T DO in a million years is jack straight into the system that ACTUALLY CONTROLS THE MONEY and make direct changes to the code.
And if you were working with a small number of employees who actually handle the existing system, you'd tell them what you were doing and why.
The only reason you'd go about installing a custom reporting system in this way is if YOU THOUGHT IT WAS ILLEGAL. If it's legal, what's the rush?
We should be supremely outraged simply on a level of operational security. An unvetted 25-year-old being paid by a private citizen has received root-level access to one of the government's most sensitive systems. He's installed a private server. He didn't even GIVE HIS FULL NAME to the local security folks. Even if that server is just sending to an AI, why isn't that a huge concern? You'd be concerned if it sent everything on the Treasury code to Deepseek, wouldn't you?
The most benign version of what's happening: Musk knows that a few people get paid big money because government computing still uses COBOL in 2025. He's being a "disruptor" to move in on these systems, maintained by corrupt bureaucrats making big bucks off system instability. His people and his AI institute new code (without concern for legality, of course). Now the entire government computing infrastructure depends upon Musk and his employees, and they get to do what all those COBOL programmers are now: rake in the big bucks because nobody else understands the code or can keep it running.
That's the best case scenario. Most likely, Musk told Trump that by reworking the computing infrastructure, setting up a "kill switch" on all spending that Trump will control. It's certainly illegal for Musk to just switch off all payments to USAID, but if Trump told him to do it, using computers to bypass all those disloyal human "deep state" bureaucrats isn't illegal, is it? (It is, but not so clearly, and who will enforce the law?) A computer is ultimately loyal: it will do what it is told instead of objecting that something is unlawful. Accounting programs will happily keep two sets of books.
That he's doing things in a massively insecure way without telling anyone why and trying to conceal even the names of the people doing the work is highly suggestive, but Kevin, if you assume Musk is actually smart and knows what he's doing, I don't see how you can possibly assume a benign motivation here.
BuT hEr EmAiLs ThO
+100
COBOL is easy, it was deliberately designed to be easy.
AI isn't very good with COBOL because there isn't much of it in its training materials, so I very much doubt AI will be able to figure out the COBOL.
But, any reasonably competent human programmer can figure it out.
The problem is not COBOL but the fact that much of this source code is lost and the dependencies between the programmes are not well or at all documented. AI can't help here, will never be able to help here.
Unfortunately all these giant mainframe systems tend to have modern front-ends and interfaces. Stopping or manipulating payments doesn't require access to the original code, only to the interfaces. I'm sure the Musk kiddies are able to do that.
The law is what can be enforced. In the absence of enforcement, the law is irrelevant. That's where we are with Musk and his acolytes.