Senators say Bessent misled them on DOGE's Treasury access

Three Senate Democrats criticized Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for what they call a "lack of candor" about what DOGE workers are doing with U.S. payment systems. 

The senators, in a letter to Bessent, accuse him of providing "inaccurate or incomplete information" regarding the access that Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency effort had to the payment systems.  

"Despite Treasury's denials, DOGE personnel had the ability to modify system coding and were planning to use the Treasury systems to help pause payments by other agencies," according to the letter authored by Senators Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden and Jack Reed dated Wednesday. "You need to provide a clear, complete, and public accounting of who accessed the systems, what they were doing, and why they were doing it." 

Last month, the newly-formed DOGE acquired access to the Treasury's payment system. That prompted a senior level civil servant who tried to block the move to abruptly leave. Attorneys general from 19 states and three labor unions also filed lawsuits to prevent DOGE's access to the sensitive systems. 

The senators pointed to Bessent's recent interview with Bloomberg News in which he said no one was "tinkering" with the payment system. "These are highly trained professionals. This is not some roving band running around doing things. This is methodical and it is going to yield big savings," he said at the time.

They also pointed to a letter Treasury sent to Wyden on Feb. 4 that said DOGE only had read-only access to the system and likened DOGE's involvement to an "operational efficiency assessment" that was "similar" to previous audits and reviews, and that there was no intent to stop any payments.

The senators said that documents released in conjunction with the state lawsuits show that "those earlier representations have turned out to be wrong."

The lawsuit, they say, disclosed that a 25-year-old software engineer and not Tom Krause, the DOGE lead at Treasury, was granted access to the payment systems or source code, that he received a laptop that connected to a source code repository, as well as read-only access of the systems.

They also cite a sworn statement from an official who said Krause and the engineer, Marko Elez, were drawing up a payment plan to assist agencies to comply with an executive order to pause foreign aid-related payments. Elez left DOGE last week after a report linked him to online comments on racism and eugenics, though Musk later said he would be reinstated.

The process was also designed to flag payment files for the US Agency for International Development and the Department of Health and Human Services, the senators said.

"You said that DOGE was conducting a review to improve efficiency, but it was actually trying to use the payment systems to help implement a broad funding freeze," the senators wrote in the letter. "You downplayed the risk to the integrity of the Treasury systems while career civil servants responsible for them scrambled to mitigate it."

The senators asked Bessent to respond to their queries by Feb. 14.