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.
Perhap but also I think each payable comes with codes for the program and account, so he could set up a kill process before the check is issued based on payee and/or program code. That could be the mechanism to explain the reports he's killing payments to Lutheran orgs (I guess refugee resettlement).
Shorter version: Dogs can't play basketball
Until proven otherwise, we should assume Trump and Elon are just doing what they always do. Stealing money and creating a mechanism for graft.
It's unlikely that they have abandoned their usual tactics and taken a sudden interest in building a great internal reporting system.
Anything is possible, but graft seems like the obvious play here.
Roundoff amounts in the federal budget must amount to a tidy sum. Maybe Trump feels entitled to it, and that is the real purpose of DOGE.
Every penny spent by the government is in a line item in the federal budget, which, like every other law, is public information. Hard to see what additional information he is going to get by examining payment system code.
The budget will have line items for the general purpose of the funds, but it won't tell who specifically, with every bit of confidential information, is receiving the funds.
At the very least Musk will use this information to publicly paint a target and sic his fanboys on every single person or organization he decides should be publicly harassed.
My mother's social security number and other person information are not a line item in any budget.
realrobmac's mother's ssn is not a line item, but every dollar spent is tracked by a series of codes that identify the line item that authorizes the expenditure, the specific part of the specific agency that spent it, and the person or series of people who signed off on the particular expenditure, where they work, who their supervisor is, etc. (Not pennies which are usually rounded.)
I don't know about social security specifically, but for most agencies this stuff is relentlessly tracked.
As far as trump is concerned, it is mainly a control system to make it easie to be a dictator. He will presumably use it for graft too, but mainly to intimidate essentially everybody he feels like.
Musk view less obvious. Maybe he think himself as vice-dictator, or thinks he will be able to be a puppet-master, specially after Trump dies.
At least according to Talking Points Memo, they've already made pretty extensive changes to the code base, all of which "seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked." (https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/musk-cronies-dive-into-treasury-dept-payments-code-base)
Personally, I wouldn't dismiss something just because it's "wildly illegal". As far as I can tell, everyone in the new administration genuinely believes they are above the law now, it just doesn't apply to them, and the rest of us just have to find out if that's true or not.
Right. Trump has control of all Federal law enforcement agencies. Who's going to stop him or Musk from doing illegal things?
The House Judiciary Committee. They must be saving up a big batch of impeachable offenses to dump at the end of the first month instead of going apeshit with each day's new outrage. The Constitutional reins are firmly in the hand of...
Jim Jordan?? We are so screwed.
Wildly illegal seems to be a selling point to anything they do, checks and balances are just shit that's in their way. They're daring anyone to step in.
It's the old hacker's law of the jungle: if it's possible, it isn't wrong. If you could break in, the victim deserved it for not providing better security. The spoils belong to the smart.
"seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked."
I would take this with a grain of salt, the second half of it doesn't really make a lot of sense from a software level, and everything at every stage is in the database, with every database command auditable.
Robert `); DROP TABLE Students; Yeah, yeah, I know. But the thing is, contrary to what you say, there's no way to be sure. And _that_ is what's scary.
"But this isn't just illegal, it's wildly illegal. There's just no way Musk could be thinking of doing this."
What on Earth makes you think Musk or anyone in Trump's inner orbit cares one bit about the legality of things?
They'll do anything they believe they can get away with, and it's been made abundantly clear that they can get away with anything. Who is going to stop them?
The Republican controlled Congress that rubber stamps anything Trump wants?
Trump's DOJ or FBI who have made clear their priority is to persecute those deemed Trump enemies?
The corrupt Supreme Court that has never ran out of ideas to ignore precedent and rule in whatever way benefits Trump?
Really, please, pray tell who in your bizarro world of law abiding right wingers will tell Musk "Sorry, that is illegal so you can't do it, and if you do it, we'll prosecute you for breaking the law"
Conveniently, these government agencies are in DC, so there isn't even a blue state governor or district attorney to do the filing of state-level theft, assault, or trespassing charges against him. (You know, like if his minions push some bureaucrat or security guard blocking their path on the public sidewalk in front of a federal building in, say, New York City.)
BTW, have you noticed that Musk has unnaturally short fingers? Not sure what it means, but it can't be good.
Musk has spent the past several years trying to remove every source of discipline from his life. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he really did do the wildly illegal thing.
God, Kevin really is naive, isn't he?
Sometimes, yes. He's so far refusing to acknowledge there has been a coup of our government. At least the FBI appears to have some cojones, too bad the other agencies are rolling over.
This is a constitutional crisis.
"I'll bet Claude and GPT-4 can do a credible job of hacking their way through a big, boiling pot of COBOL spaghetti."
Um... What?
"Spaghetti code" -- a term I recall hearing from the instructor when I took a COBOL course something like 38 years ago (when the language was only something like 28 years old).
That's not the point. I think that Kevin is, as is his wont, massively overestimating the utility of these tools.
Relevant, RE: COBOL
https://www.crisesnotes.com/day-five-of-the-trump-musk-treasury-payments-crisis-of-2025-not-read-only-access-anymore/
The issue with understanding and grasping a COBOL system is not knowing COBOL, as a programming language, in the abstract. Nor is it, god help me, something that AI can “do” because you fired one of these chatbots up and got some code that could compile when you asked “write me some COBOL code”. The issue is understanding the specific physical limitations of the system, the way that it interacts with the “Business Logic” of the code and a million other contextual factors.
There is specific code which tells you where to direct specific payments in specific ways and the structures, and why they are structured the way they are, requires deep contextual knowledge. This is “business logic”. The entire issue with COBOL and why it has been such a struggle to maintain it is that COBOL systems (both private and public) developed for decades with very little documentation, have a million different path dependent coding choices.
And this is exactly where these LLMs excel in software analysis. I am a professional software engineer and when I use ChatGPT 4 every working day. People here who casually scoff it off are simply ignorant.
You can give an LLM a pile of code it would take you days to pore over before finally understanding the flow enough to make a few tweaks and it will tell you what do change and why in seconds. You verify it yourself of course, but the time savings are immense.
I've played with it on the job to translate code, it is still far from being able to do what is being described above, and it does not elicit business rules at all.
The LLMs can't puzzle out WHY a thing is coded the way it is. That's the point. I'm well aware of how useful LLMs are at generating pretty good code.
The way COBOL works, and more importantly the way it is used and that its usecases have evolved, is much more arcane than that and you can't divine it just by feeding the code into an LLM.
That's what is being referred to by "business logic" in the post I linked (which you should read, in full). I don't think you have grokked that yet.
This is such a typical, uninformed, handwavey Kevin thing to say.
Agreed.
I have my doubts they're messing with existing cobol code, which would be taking on more responsibility than they want, but every change is trackeable.
They can observe the database(s) and know everything that's happening without touching a line of code.
There's no such thing as "legal" and "illegal" any longer. Trump is the state. His will is law, and the US is a full-on failed republic.
At the risk of beating the same dead horse as usual, I don't think that Kevin's really thought through what it means to say that something's "illegal". At its heart, the laws basically codify and, in the abstract, enforce social norms. We all know the enormous disregard that Republicans have for norms. And now we need to recognize that they've got the same distain and disregard for laws, too.
What distinguishes "laws'" from regular social norms is that state power is used to enforce "laws". But laws are not self-enforcing and if there's nobody willing and able to enforce them, then laws fall by the wayside.And it's very clear that there is nobody ready, willing, and able to enforce the laws against any MAGA operative and certainly not against the MAGA president and co-president.
Saying that something is "illegal" is just obsolete. We've created an entire class of people to whom the law does not apply. Our current situation is Wilholt's Law run wild: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect". Kevin needs to recognize this profound change in our society.
+1
There is delayed enforcement of the law however, after follow up elections, so I doubt Musk considers himself untouchable, and as such will not do wildly illegal things, which would result in potential imprisonment (more likely exile on the lam in his case), and end of business relationship with USA, but his judgment appears questionable at times, so maybe he will make irreversible mistakes for him and the rest of us (that he will end up being responsible for).
^ key phrase there "wildly illegal", not wildly illegal may very well be in scope
It’s highly unlikely that either Musk, Trump, or any of their minions will ever be held to account for any crimes they will commit. There is simply no one with both the capacity and the will to enforce the law against them. The Department of Justice is the agency of government that has the sole power to prosecute federal crimes and that organization now sees its duty as prosecuting Trump’s enemies.
And any delay will likely be considerable. Trump’s current term of office has four more years to go. It’s highly likely that if he’s still alive, Tump will run again for a third term and my guess is that will be okay with the Republicans in congress and the Supreme Court. So that’s at least eight years.
But even then, I don’t see any MAGA criminals being prosecuted. It’s highly unlikely that there will ever be another Democratic president and even if one should miraculously be elected, the party’s leadership has demonstrated absolutely no appetite for holding Trump and his minions accountable. The DOJ expended vast resources prosecuting January 6th foot soldiers but basically chose to give high ranking party members a pass. They had years to indict them but they never bothered to go after any important Republicans. And they’ve shown little interest thus far in doing anything except issuing press releases about what’s happening now.
Trump is not running again, Congress would never pass that amendment, and the Supreme Court most definitely will not allow it without an amendment.
Your blind trust in both Congress and the Supreme Court despite failing again and again every time they could have stopped this madness, either by ignoring laws, reinterpreting the Constitution, or simply by making up shit is quite charming to watch. Like watching a kid claim with absolute certainty that Santa will bring the presents wrote on a letter.
Some people argue that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution doesn’t make Trump ineligible to be President. However, the Supreme Court did not adopt that argument in 2024. Instead, the Court ruled in Trump v. Anderson that even if Trump engaged in insurrection against the United States, states still had to allow him on the ballot. If the Supreme Court had ruled the other way, Trump would not have appeared on the ballot in Colorado, and most likely would not have appeared on the ballot in Maine. That wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the election, because Trump lost those states. Trump won the election and no subsequent action by the Supreme Court prevented him from taking office.
Congress is not going to repeal the 22nd amendment, and the Supreme Court is not going to rule that Trump is eligible to be President. But the Supreme Court didn’t stop Trump from becoming President in 2024-2025, and I don’t seen any reason to expect anything different from them in 2028-2029.
I do think that another four years of Trump will generate a backlash which will make it hard for him to win if he does run in 2028.
In four years, a backlash against Trump might not matter. He will totally control every organ of government and they will all be stocked with obedient stooges. He can simply announce that he's running again and there's nothing that anyone can do about it short of violent, bloody revolution.
Similarly, if he loses, he can simply announce that he won big and, again, there's nothing that can be done about it short of violent revolution. The institution of government (DOJ, local prosecutors, FBI) will be defunct or under his control.
And the Supreme Court, which changed our basic governmental system from republican to monarchy and created Donald Trump as the USA's first (as yet uncrowned) king is surely not going to stop him.
These people definately do consider themselves untouchable, and why wouldn't they? If Musk needs a pardon, and has not had a falling out yet, Trump will give him one. $400B buys you alot of self confidence, even if you think that somehow it is over confidence.
Sometimes it is like talking to a person who says to you "well, I'll just walk out the door if the negoriation gets that bad" while they are unaware the the door is locked already, and there are 5 muscle bound goons between them and the door, and they are shackled to the chair.
So, just some software refactoring. No big whoop if they insert some micropayment transaction charges credited to memecoin accounts, right? I mean, it's only $5 trillion worth of payments a year--won't add up to much. No one will even notice. And it's certainly not illegal. Banks, billionaires do it all the time to everyone else. Why shouldn't taxpayers make automatic contributions, too? And with the help of ChatGPT, sheez, really nothing to worry about.
Just round off the fractions of a penny on transactions.
They already "round". You're suggesting "truncate".
David and Leslie Newman (or their estates if they are no longer with us) should ask for royalties. That was part of the plot of Superman 3 all the way back in 1983.
We're in a remake of Office Space? Are we all going to have to wear Nazi "flair" now? Boy is this giving me a case of the Mondays!
Michael: "I must've put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. ----, I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail."
Seems to me the whole thing is prep for the debt limit and budget battle coming.
Trump and Musk want to submit a budget with a big surplus. Closing or moving USAID ain't gonna do it though.
They can't, at least not without removing almost 25% of the total payments from the stream. The Federal government spends about 22% of GDP; it takes in about 17%, or a shortfall of 5%. Five divided into twenty-two is, interestingly, 22.7%. So they need to find 22% of 22% of $30 trillion or about $1.5 trillion to cut.
That's more than ALL of the "Discretionary Spending" (about $1.1 trillion) that the government makes. Trump sure as hell won't let them renege on bond payments, and the "mandatory payments" mostly go to politically powerful groups: senior, the military and its retirees, and the disabled.
So, no "surplus" unless they raise taxes. Maybe tariffs can close the gap, but it's a big one.
Yes agree.
This may lead to the moment where Trump and Musk part ways if Musk says the only way to give him a tax cut is drop SS, Medicare and Medicaid.
Yep.
Ya I don't think they get there, even with doctored numbers, which doesn't mean they won't still go through with extending tax cuts without offsets, if they can get it through.
I have no idea what, exactly, he's doing or if this is just BS, but here you go!
"He (Musk) also said the early days of Trump’s presidency, combined with a Republican-controlled Congress, presented a unique chance of implementing a radical overhaul of US government. “If it’s not possible now, it’ll never be possible. This is our shot,” he said. “This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have. And if we don’t take advantage of this best hand of cards, it’s never going to happen.”"
"The Doge team intends to insert artificial intelligence tools into the government computer systems to assess contracts and identify cuts, the New York Times reported."
The AI attack on humanity has begun!
So yeah. The time is ripe. It's now or never. Shit or get off the pot! Whatever they've got planned, I sure hope it's terrible and awful. It's what the people voted for. Bring it on.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/04/musk-regulation-spending
Pride and haste goeth before the fall (as sound judgment).
It's so he can find out how much anyone might be getting in payment from the government, claim their stealing it, stop payment and tie them up in court for decades until they go bankrupt.
If MAGA/GOP remain in power for decades (which they won't), we'll have bigger things to fret and pick our fights over.
Right now, it's about defending the separation of powers, and most specifically the power of the legislative branch (Congress). Otherwise they'll fail economically as usual and lose the next and/or following election as a result.
I’m sure this new code will be just as reliable as that in “FSD/Autopilot” and it will never bring the systems to a screeching halt …
Ha. This adds a whole level of literality to "driving the country into the ditch."
indeed
“But this isn't just illegal, it's wildly illegal. There's just no way Musk could be thinking of doing this.“
Have you not learned over the last 8 years that this thinking is always wrong?
The fact that Trump doesn't crow about the "great things" that Musk is doing suggests that he doesn't believe he can spin it as a positive thing. This suggests it is actually worse than it looks.
From what we've heard in past, he seems to have lawyers always warning him about illegality, so hopefully some of those are left and not all acolytes and true believers.
We're way past legal challenges. The only way out is for enough Republicans to fear the train wreck worse than Trump.
Yeah, I'm not holding my breath for that one either
Most countries that fall into kleptocracy don’t have anywhere as many guns lying around as this one does. Eventually Republicans - perhaps not Trump or Musk but run of the mill congresspeople, judges, etc - will fear 2nd Amendment solutions from all the angry conservative voters pissed that their [social security, Medicare, tax refund, whatever] that they were counting on not arriving or the job that depended on public spending being eliminated. No private security, police or military force can protect all the elected Republicans all the time.
Thhat will not bother Trump, and will give him a great excuse to use aggressive law-enforcement, which is really what he wants to do (be a "strong" dictator).
I don’t doubt Trump won’t care, because he never cares about anything that doesn’t happen to himself. But the workers inside that building will care, and once they see law enforcement is on the side of the attackers, some percentage of them will take up arms themselves and seek justice on their own. And that path leads to widespread chaos.
Slightly off topic, I see that Trump has eliminated, or at least claimed to eliminate, the customs duty exemption on shipments worth less than $800.00, and read that last year there were about a billion such shipments. That means just about three such shipments for each American, on average. There are going to be MANY pissed off people when their latest cheap whatever from Shein or Temu is first delayed for customs inspection and then they're required to pay duty on it.
As we have seen from the fuss and bother over the price of eggs, small things can cause just as much anger as big ones, and when the small things affect most of the population the results can be significant.
It will put such companies as Temu and Shein out of business in the US. That's probably a good thing.
Given the size of the deficit, tax increases generally are a good thing. That doesn't mean that tax increases, and the elimination of the small shipment duty exemption is definitely a tax increase and a very visible one, are popular. Whether or not this is a good thing, it is most definitely going to be a VERY unpopular thing.
People like the Convict Chief and Muskatell know that, legal or not, it's all okay if (1) they got to do it, and (2) saw few or no penalties from doing it.
I think he's trying to block payments. Yes, it's wildly illegal, but he's doing it with the President's authority, which means it gets back to impounding, and we honestly don't know how this SCOTUS would rule on it, or if Trump would consider their ruling binding. So just because it's wildly illegal doesn't mean he can't get away with it. Not to mention they've already violated a number of laws, so legality doesn't seem much of an obstacle for them.
Sure, he could be using just for data mining, to cherry pick DEI or whatever he wants to hate on. But that's really drinking from the firehose. He can get all the information he needs (from a practical standpoint) from a number of more readily available sources. He's sure his mining system will be so much more effective than all the traditional ways of digging through the budget?
Maybe, but control makes more sense and fits his personality better.
ETA: Especially when he's announcing closing/deleting departments on Twitter. He really seems to think he's going to be able to eliminate any program or department at will.
They really believe they have a mandate to remake and reorganize the federal government, which includes closing agencies, combining them, firing anyone they like, shutting down programs authorized by Congress, etc..
So far, they are right.
They are only right because (1) people haven’t noticed all the things they depend on that are partially or wholly paid for by the feds failing or gone yet and (2) our electoral system gives rural people far more say than urban or suburban people, so it’ll take a while before half of our electoral system reflects the views of a majority of our population.
They don't think they have a mandate, except insofar as they say so in public.
They think they have a chance to do it right now, and won't have that chance later. It's literally a blitzkrieg argument.
I wouldn't confuse Musk's public communications with what he's actually doing, as he is trying to become a hero to the far right (not just here), and probably enjoys seeing the other side panic too (he likes to troll a little bit).
Still it's hard to figure the scope of what he is doing, but I would imagine he's getting legal advice all the way through.
He famously had to spend $44 billion on a company against his will because he made a troll offer publicly.
This is not a man who carefully listens to legal advice.
I know it's trite to say at this point, but the idea that something being "verry illegal" means trump and musk won't do it is absurd. And building a better reporting capability into treasury systems is both hard and plausibly useful, so i'm pretty sure that's not what they're up to. they might steal a bunch of data from existing systems, but they're not doing any actual work.
What musk needs is enough knowledge to score a government contract for an AI agent that will audit treasury department payments. With that billion $ contract from the government, xAI will increase its valuation manyfolds and musk will get even richer. It's pretty simple.
What I think Trump wants is the ability to turn off payments to anyone, whether or not it's legal to do so. And to use this as a threat, mostly. He won't bear any criminal responsibility for it, after all. All that will happen is that the payee will sue, and get an injunction, maybe, to get the payment, after spending a bunch of legal fees. And they will continue to be vulnerable to the process afterwards.
I agree with the take above that "very illegal" means nothing to these jokers.
No court can threaten Trump personally with sanctions, since SCOTUS declared him immune. And any other functionary will be assured of a pardon. This is license to extort.
The only potential relief is impeachment. When hell freezes over.
Which demonstrates why the immunity decision was soooo goddam terrible.
"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."
Kevin, you idiot, control of the system gets you everything.
If they're able to say "no, that payment isn't happening", that's it. Who's going to make them? The FBI? The Secret Service? What happens if the stop paying any agent who won't bend the knee? Sure, some of them probably have principles and be willing to take the financial hit. They'll get replaced with ones who don't. The wheels of justice move too slowly for control of the payments system to not get them what they want: absolute power over everything.
How's SCOTUS going to stop them? Are they going to physically go stop them? Because that's kinda where we are at this point: they have ruinous financial leverage over anyone who could go physically stop them from doing whatever they want.
Our existing system of public payments should not be a source of ruinous financial leverage" over anyone, as long as everything is on the up and up. Privacy and classified security concerns I get, but not extortion just for having access, admin or not.
People still gotta eat. It may seem like “our system of public payments should not be a source of ruinous leverage over anyone” but it is. Lots of people (and companies that employ people) are insolvent without federal payments they were promised.
I thought the reference was to scandalous things, not what you mentioned there.
"As long as everything is on the up and up" - dude, just lol.
Who do you think pays federal judges? Where do you think the money comes from? What about federal law enforcement? Tax returns? Medicaid payments? Social Security? Payments to companies who perform contractual services?
The list goes on, and on, and on, and on. If (when) they figure out how to selectively stop payments to these things, even down to an individual person...
This is why the rule of law may have effectively ended on Friday, January 31, 2025.
I think Kevin is dead right. Musk is "following the money" and knowing the money flows give great insight. Thing of it is, there is a possibility that nobody has ever really done this before and he may actually learn something about how things work in the government that nobody knew before. Too bad he appears to be interested in using this information to do things I dislike a lot.
Right mission, wrong man (asset/resource). It's a mind-numbingly gargantuan task however to do anything but add to the data observability, which overall is not a bad thing if not monopolized and made public info (without protected private and classified data).
Good and hard. This is what the people voted for. Bring it on.
“One of the United States’ leading funders of science and engineering research is planning to lay off between a quarter and a half of its staff in the next two months, a top National Science Foundation official said Tuesday.”
The only thing that will make the slide into kleptocracy different here than in Europe or Asia is the sheer number of guns regular American people have. Cut off enough payments and eventually more Luigis will walk into the government office or government aid recipient’s workplace they feel owed or wronged them, guns a blazing. And at that point, the only response will either be massive military style executions of civilians (think Tiananmen Square) or a full out civil war between states trying to quell the violence vs states egging it on.
Whatever Musk is doing, he's following the tech industry's SOP of forever beta and moving fast and fix whatever one breaks.