Musk associates sought to use critical Treasury payment system to shut down USAID spending, emails show
CNN
Four days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk’s top lieutenants at the Treasury Department asked its acting secretary, a career civil servant, to immediately shut off all USAID payments using the department’s own ultra-sensitive payment processing system.
Four days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk’s top lieutenants at the Treasury Department asked its acting secretary, a career civil servant, to immediately shut off all USAID payments using the department’s own ultra-sensitive payment processing system. The ask was so out of line with how Treasury normally operates, it prompted a skeptical reply from David Lebryk, then serving as acting Treasury secretary, who said he did not believe “we have the legal authority to stop an authorized payment certified by an agency,” according to a source familiar with the exchange. Lebryk suggested a “legally less risky approach” would be for the State Department, which oversees USAID, to rescind the payments itself and examine whether they complied with President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order freezing foreign development aid. Tom Krause, a former tech executive and now the top DOGE staffer at Treasury, responded that Lebryk could have legal risk himself should he choose not to comply. This back and forth over email, described to CNN by a source familiar with it, reveals the first known indication that Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency emissaries sought to use Treasury’s tools to block some payments, fulfilling the president’s political agenda. The ensuing controversy set off a chain reaction around Washington this week, sparking a tense political debate and emergency court proceedings over DOGE’s access to the system and the administration’s potential interest in using it to turn off payments as it chooses.
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