Five former US Treasury secretaries have attacked the actions of Elon Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), warning that America’s financial ccredibility is at risk.
Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew and Janet Yellen – collectively the 70th, 71st, 75th, 76th and 78th secretaries of the US Treasury – have warned that the tradition that America’s payment system has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants has been upended, after Musk’s Doge team was granted ‘full access’ to the federal payment system, the Guardian has reported.
Writing in the New York Times today, the distinguished quintet warn that the political actors at DOGE have not been subject to the same rigorous ethics rules as civil servants, and lack the training and experience to handle private, personal data.
They say: “While significant data privacy, cybersecurity and national security threats are gravely concerning, the constitutional issues are perhaps even more alarming.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.”
They point out that it is up to Congress to decide how U.S. federal dollars are spent, saying: “During our collective 18 years at the helm of the Treasury, we never were asked to stop congressionally appropriated funds from being paid out in full.
“Not since the Nixon administration has this type of executive action been contemplated. At that time, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the president did not have the power to withhold federal funds that Congress had authorized.”
The federal payments system controls more than $6 trillion of federal cashflow each year, with millions of Americans depending on it for social security and Medicare benefits.
Main Image: Door AgnosticPreachersKid – Eigen werk, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4119783
