Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has endured relentless attacks from Democrats and their cult-like minions for the high crime of ‘making government more efficient’ and ‘finding waste, fraud, and abuse’ — something the ‘party of the working class’ (not) used to favor. But despite the unhinged assault on him, his safety, his Tesla business, and his integrity, Musk has continued to lead the Department of Government Efficiency and has made another startling discovery, perhaps the worst one yet.
Musk, who rightly has called the finding “a big deal,” noted that his team managed to find a major flaw in the U.S. Treasury Department’s automated payment system:
Last week, Treasury went live with its first automated payment verification system. In total, $334 million in improper payment requests were identified and rejected due to:
-Missing budget codes
-Invalid budget codes (i.e. the payment was not linked to the budget)
-Budget codes with no authorization (i.e. the budget had already been fully spent)
For the uninitiated or TDS-inflicted, the DOGE team just saved taxpayers $334 million in likely fraudulent payments – not bad for a couple of days’ work.
This development raises serious questions about how funds were managed before these controls were implemented; imagine trillions flowing out the door without proper coding. In February, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) identified a critical flaw in the Treasury system: the Treasury Access Symbol (TAS)—the standard financial process code linking each payment to its budget line item—was optional for about $4.7 trillion in disbursements and often left blank, rendering those payments untraceable. DOGE has since mandated TAS usage, restoring full traceability for all Treasury transactions.
In other words, checks totaling $4.7 trillion were issued with no way to trace their destination. For $4.7 trillion. What DOGE has now introduced, after who knows how long and how much money may have been misallocated, is basic accountability. It’s astounding that it took this long, and this administration, to enforce such fundamental control. This delay underscores just how entrenched and resistant to reform our sprawling federal spending apparatus has become. This is a massive story, and it is telling that it’s mostly Democrats who don’t want this fixed.