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Five former U.S. Treasury secretaries have warned that Elon Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency may pose a threat to democracy, with efforts being made to “unlawfully undermine the nation’s financial commitments.”
Robert E. Rubin, Lawrence H. Summers, Timothy F. Geithner, Jacob J. Lew, and Janet L. Yellen said they had taken the “extraordinary step” of writing the New York Times op-ed due to concern over the “arbitrary and capricious political control of federal payments.”
This follows a federal judge temporarily restricting Musk and DOGE from accessing a critical Treasury Department payment system that distributes tax returns, social security benefits, and disability payments, among other things. The judge cited a risk of “irreparable harm.”
In the piece “Our Democracy Is Under Siege,” the former secretaries said that DOGE’s “political actors” had “upended” the nation’s payment system’s typically nonpartisan nature.
“We were fortunate that during our tenures in office no effort was made to unlawfully undermine the nation’s financial commitments. Regrettably, recent reporting gives substantial cause for concern that such efforts are underway today,” they wrote.
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“We take the extraordinary step of writing this piece because we are alarmed about the risks of arbitrary and capricious political control of federal payments, which would be unlawful and corrosive to our democracy.”
The five noted that such “actors” had not been subject to the same “rigorous ethics rules” as normal civil servants, and lacked the training and experience to handle private and personal data such as Social Security numbers and bank account information.
“Their power subjects America’s payments system and the highly sensitive data within it to the risk of exposure, potentially to our adversaries,” they wrote.
“The role of the Treasury Department — and of the executive branch more broadly — is not to make determinations about which promises of federal funding made by Congress it will keep, and which it will not.”
The opinion piece also highlighted remarks by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who noted previously that even the president does not have “unilateral” power over federal finances and that the “power of the purse” was clearly in “the province of Congress.”
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In addition, the secretaries warned, the unfettered access of DOGE officials to the nation’s funds could potentially affect the disbursement of vital paychecks, including to veterans, federal workers, and Medicare providers.
“People often rely on these funds for survival, making any risk of their cutoff or delay existential,” they wrote. “But even more than the importance of making good on particular commitments is the importance of making good on the principles that this country stands for.
“Our credibility, once lost, will prove difficult to regain.”
In Saturday’s ruling to restrict Musk and DOGE’s access to funds, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer ordered the destruction of any downloaded information from the payment system by anyone given access to it since January 20.
In the ruling, Engelmayer cited “the risk that the new policy presents of the disclosure of sensitive and confidential information and the heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking.”
