Notes on the Crisis - Day Five of the Trump-Musk Treasury Payments Crisis of 2025: Not “Read Only” access anymore

Nathan Tankus
February 5, 2025

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I am going to state the obvious: Until this crisis is resolved or it fundamentally destroys the ability for economic and social life to continue in the United States, this newsletter is now devoted to this crisis full time. Since reporting and sources which have emerged subsequently to yesterday’s piece which I discuss below, it has become clear that at least some of my worst fears are proving true. Thus I’m officially labeling this crisis the “Trump-Musk Treasury Payments Crisis of 2025”. Originally I was going to number this crisis by business days, but as Musk is proudly tweeting about, DOGE is working the weekends. So today is Day 5 of the crisis.

Since I published my article at 6 am yesterday morning, a number of current and former Bureau of the Fiscal Service officials have reached out and unfortunately confirmed the accuracy of my reporting. Both in my understanding of the technical situation and the extreme dangers that the access which had been reported up to that point. All thought read only access was extraordinarily dangerous to the country. Unfortunately, my sources also tell me that the subsequent anonymous sources mainstream journalists reported who worked to downplay the situation are not accurate.

Wired beat me to the punch of reporting that a top DOGE employee, 25 year old former SpaceX employee Marko Elez, has not only read but write access to BFS servers. What can I say, I had to sleep and my sources messaged me after I was asleep. Their article is entitled “A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System”, my sources have also independently (and before publication of the Wire article at 1 AM today) confirmed their reporting that:

Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: The Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and Secure Payment System (SPS) at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a top-secret mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy. [...]

Typically, those admin privileges could give someone the power to log into servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to. [...]

"Technically I don't see why this couldn't happen," a federal IT worker tells WIRED in a phone call late on Monday night, referring to the possibility of a DOGE employee being granted elevated access to a government server. "If you would have asked me a week ago, I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the fuck knows."

All of this is absolutely true according to my sources.

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