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The main job of the US Fiscal Service (the agency of the US Treasury that Musk and his staff have rooted) is to make payments which have been authorised by other parts of the government. Given Musk is tweeting first and asking questions later, what he almost certainly means here is that (for example) when the SSA tells the Fiscal Service who to pay Social Security benefits to retirees, the Fiscal Service doesn't run any additional checks beyond the ones already run by the SSA. In the case of Social Security, this is obviously the right thing to do - the government should be paying Social Security to otherwise-eligible retirees who are suspected terrorists. It's not just a good idea, it's the law. Whether the Fiscal Service should be acting as a second line of defence to deny payment if e.g. the Department of Defence contracts with a local ally who might be a terrorist is a legitimate question about how to organise the government, with "no" being a perfectly reasonable answer.
There are two plausible stories for what is going on here:
The benign one is that Musk got read-only access to the database, which he wanted because downloading the entire database of US government disbursements (including payee, date, amount, and source of authorisation) is the easiest way to do what he wants to do with @DOGE (as opposed to the DOGE established by Trump's executive order, which is something else) and the Fiscal Service was the easiest way to get the data.
The malign one is that Musk wants to control the Fiscal Service because Musk and/or Trump are planning to cut spending at the bill is paid, not the point where the expense is incurred. (This is consistent with the way Trump ran the Trump organisation until he tanked his credit rating, and is also something Musk did at Twitter). A world where (even if an invoice is approved for payment by the government department who bought the thing) @DOGE is arbitrarily blocking payments because they don't like the politics of the payee is a world where nobody competent will want to contract with the government. And if the same stunt is pulled with Social Security payments, federal payroll, or heaven forfend bond interest, the results are catastrophic. Trump and Musk are reckless enough, and Trump has joked about defaulting on the debt, so I can't rule out the possibility that the plan is to default on the federal debt, and that taking control of the Fiscal Service is the way to forestall a legal challenge.
I can understand that there's arguments that can be made as to why payments would be automatically approved, sure, but then it begs the question: why is the government paying "payment approval officers"? Couldn't the process just assume these are automatically approved? Why is someone in the loop if their job is to pass along paper?
Why indeed. I highly recommend that people on this forum read Musk's biography by Walter Isaacson. I see a lot of people who are confused by what Musk does and it would help them to not be confused.
Musk's whole method of improving systems is to break into the parts of the system that others gloss over.
For example, at Tesla, they bought a machine to do something. The machine is really slow. So Musk asks the guy running the machine why it is so slow. Guy doesn't know. Musk asks for it to be speed up. The guy doesn't know how. So he finds someone who does know. They open up the machine and speed it up +300%. It doesn't work. They dial it down to +200%. Now it works and the throughput is 3x what it was before.
99.9% of people would have treated the machine like a black box. And that's what people are doing here with the government. No one really knows how the government works, even our resident lawyers. It's far too complicated. So they treat it like a black box. Congress appropriates money. The Treasury spends it.
Okay, but like, who, actually spends it? Who signs the checks? Who is the actual person who processes the payment?
I am virtually certain that Musk's process here will uncover a bunch of fraud and waste. And that's why some people are so desperate to stop it.
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This very much seems like a win-win for right-wing populists, Trump, and Musk. They all broadly hate the government, so trashing its credibility provides fodder for them to say "Look! See how bad it is!" antics. People will state the obvious that it's particularly bad now because they're trashing it, but they'll just say "Legacy Media lies!" and ignore it.
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