A group of five former US treasury secretaries are warning that the Trump administration has put the country’s key payment systems “under siege” and is undermining the checks and balances of the federal government.
The secretaries warned that the administration had compromised roles historically given to non-partisan career civil servants and had replaced them with “political actors”, according to a New York Times op-ed published on Monday. The secretaries specifically called into question Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, and the appointees that Musk has installed within agencies, including the treasury department.
“While the significant privacy, cybersecurity and national security threats are gravely concerning, the constitutional issues are perhaps even more alarming,” the former secretaries wrote. “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 secretaries warned that the payment system’s “critical infrastructure” was at risk of failure if the code that underwrites it was “not handled with due care”.
The op-ed’s authors are Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew and Janet Yellen – all former treasury secretaries who served under Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Since Donald Trump has taken office, the president has given Musk complete freedom to carry out his plans to purge what Musk sees as government waste.
This has wreaked chaos in Washington, where federal employees were given offers of buyouts and warned that they could be at risk of layoffs, all federal grants and loans were frozen and Doge attempted to shut down USAid, the federal agency that is responsible for distributing global humanitarian aid.
So far, many of Doge’s attempts at overhauling the federal government have been temporarily blocked by multiple federal judges, making the future viability of Musk’s plans unclear.
Musk has also come under criticism for trying to give people who have worked for his private companies, including Tesla, the Boring Company and xAI, roles in the federal government that include access to sensitive data, including social security numbers and bank account information for many Americans.
Steve Davis, Musk’s longtime lieutenant and the current president of the Boring Company, has been trying to help Musk get rid of USAid. Meanwhile, Amanda Scales, another former Musk employee, was appointed chief of staff of the office of personnel management, the federal government’s human resources arm. Musk also reportedly hired a group of engineers fresh out of high school and college to aid his takeover.
Trump largely seems to be content with Musk’s action, telling reporters on 7 February that Musk was “doing a great job” and was “finding tremendous fraud and corruption and waste”.
While the former treasury secretaries do not mention Musk by name, they argue that Doge’s actions have been unconstitutional, as the role of the executive branch is to carry out laws that were passed in Congress.
“The legislative branch has the sole authority to pass laws that determine where and how federal dollars are spent,” they wrote. “It is not for the Treasury Department or the administration to decide which of our congressionally approved commitments to fulfill and which to cast aside.”
They noted that millions of Americans depend on the treasury department’s “faithful disbursement of federal funds”, including social security checks, veteran benefits, payments to Medicare providers and the salaries of federal workers.
Disruption of payments would cause a “breach of trust” among Americans and would amount to a “form of default”, they wrote, noting that “our credibility, once lost, will prove difficult to regain”.
