The Trump administration has placed a key ally of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service in charge of the Treasury Department’s financial management and payment systems as legal questions and privacy concerns swirl about the sweeping Musk-led DOGE infiltration of federal agencies.
The department’s website now lists Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley executive who still serves as CEO of Cloud Software Group, as performing the duties of the fiscal assistant secretary. Krause has reportedly been overseeing the DOGE review of federal payments. He is taking over the responsibilities of David Lebryk, a longtime official at the Treasury Department who resigned last week after a dispute with Musk allies, reportedly over Krause’s demands to halt foreign aid payments, a step that Lebryk said was illegal.
“Krause’s position will give him control over the Treasury Department system responsible for disbursing more than $5 trillion in annual payments, including for Social Security, Medicare, tax refunds and thousands of other measures,” The Washington Post reports. “Musk has demanded on social media that Treasury unilaterally stop sending these payments, accusing the department’s career staff of breaking the law.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defended the DOGE involvement in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Thursday. He insisted that the government efficiency team’s review was “operational,” not ideological. “These are highly trained professionals. This is not some roving band running around doing things. This is methodical and it is going to yield big savings,” he said.
One of the engineers reporting to Krause resigned from his role on Thursday after being linked to racist social media posts. On Friday, Musk posted a poll to his social media site asking if DOGE should rehire the staffer, 25-year-old Marko Elez. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance said he should be reinstated, and Musk later announced he would be brought back.
Why it matters: “The decision puts Musk’s DOGE in a potential position to make sweeping changes to the federal budget, with implications for tens of millions of Americans,” The Washington Post says. “The payment system, run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, contains sensitive taxpayer information, and some former Treasury officials have expressed concerns about granting access to individuals with private business interests.” And Politico notes that the installation of Krause into such a powerful role at Treasury “will likely inflame an ongoing backlash over the DOGE team’s access to the sensitive payments system.”
More targets for DOGE: At a news conference Friday, Trump was asked why DOGE needs access to the Treasury payment systems used to disburse trillions of dollars a year. Here is his response in full, but be forewarned that it’s not exactly clear:
“Well, it doesn't, but they get it very easily. I mean we don't have very good security in our country, and they get it very easily. And what we're doing, if you look at what has just taken place with respect to some of the investments that have been made on another agency that people have been talking about for years but nobody did anything about it, it's absolutely obscene, dangerous, bad, very costly. I mean, virtually every investment made is a con job. There's nothing of value to anybody unless there's a kickback scheme going on, which is possible. And we're going to be doing more and more of that. We're going to be looking at the Department of Education. We're going to be looking at even our military. We're going to be looking at tremendous amounts of money … being spent on things that bear no relationship to anything and have no value. We're talking about trillions of dollars. It will be in the end trillions of dollars being absolutely wasted and perhaps illegally, I would say certainly in many cases illegally, but perhaps illegally overall. And I'm very proud of the job that this group of young people, generally young people, but very smart people, they're doing. They're doing it at my insistence. It would be a lot easier not to do it, but we have to take some of these things apart to find the corruption, and we found tremendous corruption.”