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The Department of Government Efficiency said that it found $4.7 trillion in untraceable Treasury payments that were missing a critical tracking code.
Elon Musk’s non-official advisory body, tasked with slashing bureaucracy and reining in federal spending, said that transactions were missing the Treasury Account Symbol: an identification code used to classify all transactions of the federal government.
Transactions, logged using a TAS code, are then sent to the Treasury and Office for Management and Budget for reporting to ensure money is spent according to its intended purpose.
“The Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) is an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item (standard financial process),” DOGE wrote on Musk’s X platform late on Monday.
“In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible.”
Expenditure for the federal government in fiscal year 2024 – which started October 1 2023 to September 30, 2024 – was $6.75 trillion, according to data. The government has spent more than $2.4 trillion in the fiscal year 2025, according to an analysis of monthly Treasury statements.
The figure DOGE gave of the alleged near-impossible-to-trace payments would represent almost 70 percent of total federal spending last year.
After this discovery, the use of a TAS code to identify payments was made mandatory to enhance “insight into where money is actually going,” DOGE said.
Sharing the organization’s tweet, Musk thanked DOGE, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve for finding the discrepancy, which he says will lead to “major improvements in Treasury payment integrity.”
Wisconsin Representative Mark Pocan says that the sum of allegedly untraceable government transactions rather conveniently mirrors the $4.5 trillion in proposed new deficits through tax cuts, in a budget blueprint currently being advanced by the GOP-controlled House Budget Committee.
“It’s about finding the $4.7 trillion they need to fund the tax cuts for the wealthiest – including themselves,” the Democrat tweeted after DOGE’s announcement. “It’s never about the middle class. They’re robbing programs you benefit from to enrich themselves. Corruption.”
The Treasury was one of the first agencies DOGE embedded itself in after Trump’s inauguration on Janaury 20.
Democrats sounded alarms recently after the organization gained access to a Treasury Department payment system that manages trillions of dollars of federal transactions, including Social Security benefits and federal tax returns.
The DOGE team is now said to be seeking access to sensitive taxpayer information within the Internal Revenue Service, raising concerns from lawmakers and within the federal tax-collecting agency.
Last week, Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-old top DOGE aid, visited the District of Columbia’s Internal Revenue Service offices to examine its systems, sources told both CNN and the Washington Post.
According to The Post, Kliger has been working at the Office of Personnel Management which has been heavily involved in Musk’s work to slash government programs.
He is expected to serve as a senior adviser to the acting IRS commissioner to provide engineering assistance and consult on modernizing IT.
