Bessent gives unelected drug-addled fascist full access to the Treasury’s payment system
Have I mentioned recently that Joe Biden, who was not the Democratic nominee for president, is very old and didn’t provide a lot of juicy scoops?
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency full access to the federal payment system late on Friday, according to three people familiar with the change, handing Elon Musk and the team he is leading a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.
The new authority follows a standoff this week with a top Treasury official who had resisted allowing Mr. Musk’s lieutenants into the department’s payment system, which sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government. The official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, was put on leave and then suddenly retired on Friday after the dispute, according to people familiar with his exit.
The system could give the Trump administration another mechanism to attempt to unilaterally restrict disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress, a push that has faced legal roadblocks.
Mr. Musk, who has been given wide latitude by President Trump to find ways to slash government spending, has recently fixated on Treasury’s payment processes, criticizing the department in a social media post on Saturday for not rejecting more payments as fraudulent or improper.
Glad that the “just normal people who want to lower the price of groceries” people are back in charge!