Elon Musk Now In Charge Of Paying Nation's Bills, Which Seems Like A Terrible Idea

Why is Apartheid Andy pushing this career bureaucrat out of the Treasury Department?

We’re mad. Have some alpacas.

Have you ever wondered who writes the nation’s checks? The actual checks, we mean. Who is in charge of wire transfers of Social Security, paychecks to federal employees and pension payments to retirees, and all the gazillions of other transactions that are literally the physical manifestation of the $6 trillion in spending the United States government puts out every year?

It’s not something we have ever thought about a whole lot or at all. But the Treasury Department has something called the Bureau of Fiscal Services, which runs the nation’s various payment systems. The department is staffed by a relatively small number of nonpartisan career bureaucrats. Obviously, with the sensitive nature of who literally controls the purse strings, it seems critically important to keep any sort of politicization far away from the BFS.

Given all of that, who is the absolute last person on Planet Earth you would want to have in charge of these systems? If your first thought was “Elon Musk or one of his lickspittles” and your second thought was “Are you fucking kidding us,” congratulations, you are as rational a human being as we expect to find in the exciting nightmare that is now all our lives.

The Washington Post reports that David Lebryk, a career bureaucrat who has spent several decades climbing up to his position of Fiscal Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, is leaving after a dispute with Musk subordinates over access to the sensitive payment systems. The Post doesn’t know yet what the exact dispute is over, but it must be pretty insane if it is bringing an end to Lebryk’s career at Treasury, where he started working in 1979.

The Post headline — “Senior U.S. official to exit after rift with Musk allies over payment system” — really underplays the seriousness of this latest assault on the federal government by the Nazi ketamine addict and his merry band of teenaged sieg heil enthusiasts. Imagine these Silicon Valley nitwits, with their “move fast and break things” ethos, their arrogance, their assuredness in both their own genius and their own untouchability, with direct access to and control over every payment made by the Treasury Department.

Like disaster aid, the payment systems have never been used for partisan purposes until Donald Trump came along and demanded governors of states needing said aid gobble his tiny knob first. Does anyone think Musk and his people will continue to be good stewards of it? Or will everyone have to snack on Donald Trump’s tiny carrot before they can get their Social Security check?

But equally importantly, why is nobody asking: Can they use these levers to divert unknown hundreds of million to themselves? It’s not as if Musk is known for paying his bills and obligations - just ask anyone who he fired from Twitter.

More from the Post:

Musk has characterized the rising national debt as an existential threat to the country and has proved willing to break norms in service of sweeping change.

Elon Musk is not an elected official. He has not been confirmed by the Senate, even in one of the sham confirmation hearings where the outcome is in zero doubt, and which is the province of Republicans in 2025. He has been ostensibly placed in charge of an obscure office called US Digital Services, which Trump has renamed the Department of Government Efficiency, mostly so Musk and all his crypto bros can giggle that they work for DOGE. Why the fuck is he spreading his apartheid-friendly tentacles into every corner of American government?

This all brings up something we have been thinking about, and that is that Donald Trump seems even more disconnected from his second administration than he did from his first. During his first term, there was little doubt that all the action revolved around the Oval Office and access to the president. The collection of motley losers surrounding him fought and fought for that access, often anonymously stabbing each other in the back in the press because they knew Trump got most of his information from Fox News or the New York Post.

America: 1. Trump: 0. Trump's Funding Freeze Melts Away.

Trump Budget Idiot HEREBY ORDERS Government To STOP. Because The Woke Marxism, Probably Witches.

But as best we can tell, the power centers this time around are not in the West Wing. They are wherever the hell Elon Musk has set up for the day. (On Thursday, that was the General Services Administration, another one of those functional and important government departments that no one should want the wrecking ball that is Musk anywhere near.) They are in the departments where Musk’s lackeys, in conjunction with whatever sociopaths the Trump team has hired from the Heritage Foundation or Claremont, are busily trying to make federal employees miserable enough to quit so they won’t have to do the hard work of firing them.

Meanwhile, every glimpse of Donald Trump, he’s sitting behind the Resolute Desk signing whatever executive orders addressing some imaginary panic among right-wingers that his lackeys put in front of him.

Tim Marchman of Wired put it well when he suggested on BlueSky that Elon Musk is the head of government while Trump is the head of state. We think Jamelle Bouie gets even closer to the question:

Remember when the wingers would scream the same thing about Joe Biden? Every accusation a confession, and so forth.

We are begging, absolutely begging the Democrats to throw sand in the gears in the Senate until the public can get some answers about whether Elon fucking Musk and his cement-brained lackeys have taken over writing the government’s checks. Sand in the gears, monkeys in the wrench, pick your metaphor.

That means no more deals to move confirmation votes forwards. Shoot, no more voting for any of Trump’s nominees, period. (On Thursday, over two dozen Democrats voted for the loathsome Doug Collins to become Secretary of the Veterans Administration. To which the only appropriate response is What the hell are you doing?) Skipping the committee vote that moved Russ Vought’s nomination to head the Office of Management and Budget to the full Senate was a good start. More of that, please.

[Washington Post]

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