Senator warns of national security risks after Elon Musk’s DOGE granted ‘full access’ to sensitive Treasury systems

Representatives of Elon Musk were given “full access” to a U.S. Treasury payments system that distributes trillions of dollars to Americans annually. According to a senior U.S. legislator. who also cautioned that Musk’s access to the system presents a “national security risk.”

Senator Ron Wyden,

In a post on Bluesky on Saturday, a Democrat from Oregon and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, stated that according to informants, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent granted Musk’s group, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, permission to access the extremely sensitive Treasury system on Friday. The authorization comes after a stalemate earlier this week during which Musk’s team requested access to the system, and the Treasury’s top career official resigned.

Benefits from Social Security and Medicare, grants, and payments to government contractors—including those that directly compete with Musk’s own businesses—are all examples. “Everything,” Wyden stated in the message, alluding to DOGE’s access.

Additionally, according to the New York Times, on Friday, Bessent gave DOGE access to the Treasury’s payment system. Tom Krause, the CEO of Cloud Software Group, which controls Citrix and a number of other businesses, is reportedly one of the DOGE officials who was given access. TechCrunch reached out to Krause for comment, but Krause did not respond. An email sent Saturday to a Treasury official elicited no response.

This is the most recent attempt by Musk and his allies to seize control of the inner workings of the federal government of the United States since President Trump took office again on January 20. Trump gave Musk the command to start drastically reducing federal government expenditures as soon as he took office.

According to a letter Wyden wrote and sent to Bessent the day before, the system managed by the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service oversees the distribution of approximately $6 trillion in federal funds to American households, including payments to U.S. federal employees and contractors, tax refunds, and Social Security and Medicare benefits. Because the payments system has sensitive data about millions of Americans. Who get payments from the federal government, access to it has generally been restricted to a small number of employees, according to the Times.

The payments system “simply cannot fail, and any politically motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy,” according to Wyden’s letter.

Concerned that Musk’s wide-ranging business activities in China “endangers U.S. cybersecurity” and generate conflicts of interest that “make his access to these systems a national security risk,” Wyden wrote in his letter.

China was held accountable by the Biden administration last year for a number of attacks that targeted key U.S. infrastructure, the theft of phone records belonging to high-ranking American officials during the hacking of multiple U.S. internet and phone companies, and a late-year breach of the Treasury’s own networks. It is “unusual to be granting access to sensitive systems to an individual with such significant business interests in China,” according to Wyden, a longtime member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s own human resources division, is one of several other federal agencies that DOGE is investigating.

According to a Friday Reuters story, Musk’s aides barred professional civil servants from accessing computer systems that include the human resources records and personal information of millions of federal workers. The U.S. government later blamed China for the 2015 OPM hack, which led to the theft of personnel records belonging to over 22 million U.S. government employees, including those with security clearances.