This Will Be A Long War - DOGE Looks Under The Hood To Find Out Where Your Money Is Going
All over America supporters of Donald Trump are riding high. Trump is in the White House. A new day has dawned. Common sense has returned. Illegals are being rounded up, and we can all breathe easy again.
Not so fast. We won a battle. This is a long war, and the guys on the other side have no intention of simply packing up and going home.
David A. Lebryk was until yesterday the Fiscal Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. He was a “non-political” civil servant who controlled the computerized payment system the government uses to pay out $6 trillion a year. He was the guy who actually controlled all the money the federal government spent, where it went, and to whom.
Donald Trump, the President of the United States, directed Lebryk to give the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) headed by Elon Musk access to the payment system. The intent was to allow individuals with DOGE to see where all this money was going, how it was being accounted for, etc.
Lebryk refused. Let’s be clear. He did not refuse to comply with some instruction Musk or his people came up with on their own. He refused to comply with a direct order from the President of the United States. When it became clear Trump was serious, Lebryk resigned instead.
The office Lebryk ran pays out trillions of dollars a year. DOGE began asking for access to the payment system immediately after Trump was inaugurated. Lebryk, a supposedly non-partisan career employee, simply refused to comply. He didn’t think the President of the United States had any business snooping into how he did his job.
The secure payment system in question is run by something called the Bureau of Fiscal Service. These guys make something like 90% of the payments made by the U.S. Government. And, here’s the kicker. They don’t ever stop payments. They just cut checks.
Per CNN:
Imagine a business that operated in such a way that it simply paid out money without any regard for where it was going, whether the person who was being paid had actually done the work, or whether the payment had already been made. No one would design a system that way, and yet this is exactly the way the federal government has been operating for as many years as anyone can count.
DOGE did not simply ask about stopping payments, however. They asked for access to the full scope of the Bureau of Fiscal Service. They wanted to know how the Bureau’s computer systems worked and “each step in the disbursement process.” They also wanted to visit field offices where government workers disburse payments.
Horror of horrors, the representatives of the duly elected President of the United States wanted to know what the hell was going on within the biggest ATM machine the world has ever seen. The federal bureaucrats in DC, who have long since designated themselves a superior ruling class, had no intention of complying. They had never allowed the representatives of the great unwashed access to this inner sanctum before. They weren’t about to start now.
In the end, though, Lebryk misjudged the moment. He expected, DOGE, Musk, and Trump to blink. They did not. He is now gone, and the hood has been lifted on the machine that spews out trillions of dollars a year.
That does not mean the fight is over. The front has simply shifted to a new location.
DOGE is now digging into the computer systems of the Office of Personnel Management, (OPM) the systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees. Some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department's data systems.
"We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems," a DOGE official. "That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications."
A DOGE team has physically occupied OPM spaces. They are sleeping on sofa beds on the fifth floor of the agency's headquarters, which contains the director's office and can only be accessed with a security badge or a security escort. The sofa beds are there to allow DOGE employees to work around the clock. OPM’s chief management officer Katie Malague, has been moved out of her office to a new office on a different floor.
Welcome to the battlefield. Maybe you should hold off on popping that bottle of champagne. We won a battle. This will be a long war.
Yes, evil never rests. Wack a mole will be constant and lawfare in the courts will slow them down.
Perhaps DOGE will have to work like an archeologist scraping off one layer at a time. No doubt finding all the links between the hundreds of agencies with payment authorization will consume time. It is bound to resemble a labyrinth and the first place to spend time is with departmental employees responsible for audits.
It has been divulged over the years that the Pentagon, Medicare/Medicaid and the IRS squander billions yearly through fraud, misappropriation and lack of oversight. That is different from wasteful spending like what happens under the grant programs. Just recently Congress was dealing with a department that requested more money just to find out it was fiscally solid – incompetence or devious? Why Congress doesn’t ask to see ‘the books’ rather than rely on speculation is beyond me. They are the body that has the power to hold departments accountable. They have committee to do just that.
It’s great to be winning battles. Keep the enemy on their heels!