Senator warns of national security risks after Elon Musk’s DOGE granted ‘full access’ to sensitive Treasury systems

A senior U.S. lawmaker says representatives of Elon Musk have been granted “full entry” to a U.S. Treasury funds system used to disperse trillions of {dollars} to Individuals annually, and warned that Musk’s entry to the system poses a “nationwide safety threat.”

Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon and rating member of the Senate Finance Committee, mentioned in a post on Bluesky on Saturday that sources advised his workplace Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave Musk’s workforce, often known as the Division of Authorities Effectivity, or DOGE, authorization to entry the extremely delicate Treasury system on Friday. The authorization comes following a standoff earlier within the week, by which the Treasury’s highest-ranking profession official left the department following requests from Musk’s workforce for entry to the system.

“Social Safety and Medicare advantages, grants, funds to authorities contractors, together with those who compete immediately with Musk’s personal corporations. All of it,” wrote Wyden within the publish, referring to DOGE’s entry.

The New York Instances also reported that Bessent granted DOGE entry to the Treasury’s fee system on Friday. One of many DOGE representatives granted entry is claimed to be Tom Krause, the chief govt of Cloud Software Group, which owns Citrix and several other different corporations. Krause didn’t return TechCrunch’s request for remark. A spokesperson for the Treasury didn’t remark when emailed Saturday.

That is the most recent effort by Musk and his associates to take over the inner workings of the U.S. federal government following President Trump’s return to workplace on January 20. Following his inauguration, Trump instantly ordered Musk to start making widespread cuts to federal authorities spending.

The system run by the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service controls the disbursements of round $6 trillion in federal funds to American households, together with Social Safety and Medicare advantages, tax refunds, and funds to U.S. federal staff and contractors, in line with a letter written by Wyden and despatched to Bessent a day earlier. Entry to the funds system was traditionally restricted to a couple workers as a result of it accommodates private details about hundreds of thousands of Individuals who obtain funds from the federal authorities, per the Times.

In response to Wyden’s letter, the funds system “merely can’t fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them dangers extreme injury to our nation and the economic system.”

In his letter, Wyden mentioned he was involved that Musk’s extensive business operations in China “endangers U.S. cybersecurity” and creates conflicts of curiosity that “make his entry to those programs a nationwide safety threat.”

Final yr, the Biden administration blamed China for a series of intrusions concentrating on U.S. essential infrastructure, the theft of senior American officers’ telephone data throughout breaches of a number of U.S. telephone and web giants, and a breach of the Treasury’s own systems late last year. Wyden, additionally a long-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, mentioned it was “uncommon to be granting entry to delicate programs to a person with such important enterprise pursuits in China.”

A number of different federal departments are underneath scrutiny by DOGE, together with the federal authorities’s personal human sources division, often known as the Workplace of Personnel Administration.

Reuters reported on Friday that Musk’s representatives locked out profession civil servants from pc programs, which include the non-public knowledge and human sources information of hundreds of thousands of federal staff. The OPM was hacked in 2015, which the U.S. authorities later attributed to China, ensuing within the theft of personnel data on greater than 22 million U.S. authorities staff, together with workers with safety clearances.