Inside DOGE’s Plan to Invade the Treasury—and Throttle USAID
NEWS | 30 March 2025
From the beginning of President Donald Trump’s administration, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had a plan to monitor USAID payments and was preparing to use US Treasury Department systems to halt them, according to new court documents, emails, and affidavits obtained by WIRED. Court documents in Alliance for Retired Americans et al v. Bessent et al and American Federation of Teachers et al v. Bessent et al reveal the extent of DOGE’s penetration into the most sensitive systems at the Treasury, including the Bureau of Fiscal Service (BFS), and what exactly DOGE was hoping to accomplish. The bureau is nested within the US Treasury and handles most federal payments, to the tune of more than $5 trillion a year. WIRED first reported that Marko Elez, a former engineer at X, the social media company owned by Musk, had read/write access to two BFS systems: the Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and Secure Payment System (SPS). But documents now reveal that Elez also had “read” access to Automated Standard Application for Payments (ASAP), an accounting system where federal funds are stored in pre-authorized accounts. Court documents shared by the government reveal Elez had access as of February 1. From court filings, it appears this access was in service of the administration’s plans to target USAID. USAID was one of the earliest targets of DOGE and the Trump administration. Less than two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, the majority of the agency’s staff were placed on administrative leave, and funding to many partner organizations was cut off. The documents appear to show how plans were in place for this sudden strangulation in payments to happen. In a January 26 email between Matthew Garber, a top Treasury official, and the Treasury secretary’s chief of staff, Garber outlined the new administration’s plan to utilize BFS access to halt payments to USAID. “Fiscal will intercept USAID payments files prior to ingestion into our PAM/SPS systems (this is in place now and can begin immediately),” Garber wrote. “We developed a process to intercept the file, and additional flags to ensure we catch all USAID payment requests through our systems.” (This email chain was included as part of documents shared in the Alliance for Retired Americans lawsuit.) “Fiscal will manually pull an unredacted and unmodified copy to share with State officials,” Garber continued, outlining plans from his team. "State officials will review and provide a determination to Fiscal on whether or not to release the file into our normal payment processes.” A top Treasury official’s calendar shows that a few days later, Elez arrived in Kansas City, one of the main BFS sites, and had a full docket of meet and greets and several deep dives with the teams responsible for each of the systems. The plan was for Elez to spend the next month at the facility to identify “opportunities to advance payment integrity and fraud reduction goals.” According to a planning sheet, which was also shared with the court, “only (1) individual (i.e. the designated technical team member)”—which was Elez—“requires access to Fiscal Service systems and data at this time.”
Author: Leah Feiger. Vittoria Elliott. Matt Giles. Eric Geller. Makena Kelly. Jake Lahut. Dhruv Mehrotra. Justin Ling.
Source