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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5550 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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On the power of the purse and control of the Treasury.

I’ve seen a few articles and videos going around, referencing and linking or exerpting the various left-wing people (mostly women) on “short video” social media filming themselves crying about how they can’t sleep because they’re up all night with the thoughts of how their children are about to starve because Trump is taking their EBT and Social Security away; followed by a debunking of this — complete with links to/excerpts of the press conference addressing this mistaken view, and how these sorts of domestic benefits are unaffected by any funding halts President Trump has ordered so far — and how these people have worked themselves up due to believing scaremongering from voices on the left. But I’ve come to wonder whether this is just about riling up these sort of easily-misled people… or if it’s about laying groundwork for a fight over the Treasury Department.

I’ve repeatedly held (here and elsewhere), whenever someone has talked about “defunding the left,” that it would actually be very hard to do, because for all that the constitution gives Congress “the power of the purse,” in reality all the checks are actually written and issued by the unelected bureaucrats at Treasury, as seen in every “government shutdown.” So what if Congress orders some left-wing institution defunded… and Treasury just keeps writing the checks anyway? I’ve argued that they can, and maybe even will, just defy Congress, because who can stop them?

Well, on the one hand, we’re seeing that permanent bureaucrats are less “unfireable” than I thought. On the other, we have this tweet from Musk on how independent people at the Treasury act:

The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups.

They literally never denied a payment in their entire career.

Not even once.

So, again, what if Treasury officers keep issuing checks after being told to stop? Or, in an alternate scenario that brings things back around to my first paragraph, they start engaging in the sort of malicious compliance we’ve already seen elsewhere (like the “No DEI? Guess we have to stop teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen!” bit)? If they talk about how, since they can’t tell who’s been really fired by Trump and who hasn’t, and thus who they should or shouldn’t issue paychecks to, they’re going to err on the side of caution and halt all federal employees’ paychecks (are ICE agents going to be deporting people for free?). Or how if Trump’s talking about abolishing the IRS, that means they need to put an immediate stop to issuing anyone’s income tax refunds. Or how they’re so confused trying to figure out what is and isn’t funded by Trump’s rushed, poorly-written executive orders, they’re just going to halt all Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, EBT, etc. until things get “straightened out.”

Because what are Trump, Musk, and company going to do, fire them all? Because this is where Scott’s “Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats” really comes into play. The more people at Treasury you fire, the fewer are left to process and issue all the funds that need issued, the more everyone’s paychecks and Social Security and Medicare and EBT and tax refunds get delayed.

So, will the Treasury #Resist? Can they be reined in, or does their control over the cash spigot so many depend upon give them too much power?

Vaguely relevant:

https://x.com/jneeley78/status/1886394836195922200

Another of the DOGE Six, Gavin Kliger, has a substack and in response to the Wired article wrote a paywalled post titled “Why DOGE” with a $1k a month subscription price ($10k annual). The post is blank.

People online have been getting really upset at how young people are in charge of the treasury as opposed to boomers under Elon's New Order. I have no real opinion but think it's spectacularly based to set up a troll substack like this. Apparently some of them are super talented, one was decrypting the Herculaneum scrolls with AI.

And vaguely related to the above is this Wired story: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-government-young-engineers/.

The headline is "The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover" and it starts by revealing their full names. And it only goes downhill from there.

To me, it's utterly obvious that this is a hit piece. But then I looked at the HN discussion of this story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910910.

HN is a pretty good proxy for a left-aligned highly-online space and it is remarkable how uniform opinion is there. There's a single top-level comment pointing out that revealing individual's names like this is out of the ordinary but the rest of the opinions seem to range from (paraphrasing) "these people are idiots for listening to Elon" to "these people are traitors" (and need to be hanged?).

How long do you think this tension is going to last? Is Elon going to just continue doing his thing (and actually get something done?) and will people calm down or will he get reined in somehow? Or are we in for another tedious four years of pointless shouting?

The basic problem Trump/Musk have is that trying to defund government agencies you dislike isn't new. Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act to prevent Nixon from doing it, and the Supreme Court upheld it. If Treasury stops sending the checks, which they will imo, they'll just get enjoined and then resume sending them. More details: https://adamunikowsky.substack.com/p/simulating-doge, he thinks SCOTUS will uphold the Impoundment Control Act if it comes to them and that seems reasonable to me.

Sure, but Congress will find it easier to act to "resolve" the conflict.

Much of it is a three piece gambit -- they have to throw the agency into chaos & dysfunction, the Congress has to see that the agency being dysfunctional isn't hurting anything so it is safe to actually reform.

Congress controls the purse, just like you control your own budget. The treasury cannot block payments unilaterally, just like banks cannot do that to you for the same reasons.

If Musk has rooted the Fiscal Service, then he has the operational ability to block payments unilaterally, regardless of whether or not that is legal.

I don't know if he is planning to do this (the benign story where Musk only wants read access is also plausible), but I have no doubt that the administration has wargamed at least some scenarios which involve breaking the law and daring anyone to stop them, and refusing to make legally-required payments as a negotiating tactic is something both the Trump organisation and Musk's Twitter used as something close to SOP.

I think it is pretty common for any large entity (not just government) to have separate departments for authorizing payments and making payments. I am pretty sure in my own employer this is exactly how it works. If department or individual X with authority to authorize payments has done so it's not clear why department or individual Y should be second guessing them about whether the payment is permitted. Especially for large and complex operations it's not clear to me how the "department of writing checks" can also be expert in the subject matter of every other department and what they are and aren't authorized to spend money on. The accountability is (properly) located in the entity that authorized the payment, not the department that wrote the check. Blaming the department of check writing would be like blaming my bank for letting me send a bunch of money to gambling platforms.

I posted this in last week's thread about a nearly identical topic that is prescient here:

In constitutional law, it is very clear--the executive branch does not have the authority to stop payments. A entity like DOGE isn't even a part of the government and does not have a right to view classified material. Regardless, this is considered impoundment. There are 3 reasons for this:

  1. Article I, Section 9, Clause 7: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” President's do not create law, congress does. Withholding funding is considered "Impoundment" by

  2. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 which was upheld via judicial review by

  3. The SCOTUS ruling in Train v. City of New York (1975).

So these actions would go against all 3. The Constitution has not been amended, the law has not been repealed and the supreme court has not seen a case to change that precedent, at least not yet.

This is doubly so for Musk, who isn't even an official part of the government. If Trump wants to change this, he can ask congress to pass a law--republicans are a majority in both houses, or they can try to amend the constitution.

But this is unlawful just like the OMB executive order and for the same reasons. Congress has the power of the purse, not the president.

I think you may be wrong in certain areas. First, DOGE is part of government (read the EO). Second, the president can give info to whoever he wants. Third, the President can certainly stop payments where the authorizing legislation is broad and open ended (eg 50m to foster goodwill in LATAM is not a command to spend xx dollars on a specific project in LATAM)

First, DOGE is part of government (read the EO)

The DOGE created by the executive order is a beefed-up Government digital service, which sits in the EOP, and is headed by a United States DOGE Service Administrator who is an EOP employee reporting directly to the White House Chief of Staff. The job of this DOGE is to co-ordinate the activity of the DOGE teams set up in individual agencies (consisting of agency employees who formally report to the agency head, but have a dotted line to DOGE), with a particular focus on software interoperability. The executive order explicitly doesn't transfer any of the authority of the Office of Management and Budget to DOGE, so as far as I can see DOGE has no authority to block spending.

Even from my mostly Trump-sceptic point of view, DOGE is a good idea, and making Elon Musk the public face of it and giving him some suitable advisory role will make it more effective, as well as making it easier to pull in someone first-class from a private-sector tech company for the crucial full-time role of DOGE Service Administrator.

Elon Musk is not an employee of the EOP reporting to the White House Chief of Staff (and couldn't be while continuing to hold his private-sector jobs), and if the post of United States DOGE Service Administrator has been filled by someone else, this fact has not been publicised. The media is reporting that the people working with Musk on @DOGE are not government employees either, and are mostly still being paid by Musk-owned companies. So the @DOGE that is shutting down USAID and rooting the Fiscal Service is not the DOGE of the EO.

I can't comment on what @DOGE is doing because they aren't saying, but given that USAID and the Fiscal Service were set up by Congress it is probably illegal and definitely irregular.

DOGE itself isn’t shutting anything down they are giving info to the president who then shuts it down.

You are wrong on #1 and #2: Congressional action is required in order to create new executive branch offices. Presidents cannot do that through executive order per the constitution Article II, Section 2, Clause 2. DOGE was not created by congress and Musk has not been approved by congress. #3 depends, as most funding is earmarked to what organization it goes to.

Specifics matter. If Trump wants to have a new office in the executive branch, he will have to ask congress to create it for him. If he wants Musk to lead it, he will have to get him confirmed, the latter will never happen.

He won't do either one, so it looks like we are headed toward a constitutional crisis.

You mean offices like US AID? That was created by EO. Department level offices cannot be created by EO.

Also BS on the president being restricted on sharing info. Classification and de classification is a power of the president.

Congressional action isn't needed to create roles in the Executive Office of the President that are not "Officers of the United States". Musk could do most of what DOGE is doing legally as a Special Assistant to the President, but he isn't one, he is just a private citizen who Trump has told his top political appointees to share information with.

Well, you still haven't actually read the EO.

DOGE is established as a renaming of the US digital service to US DOGE service, with a temporary suborganization called US DOGE Service Temporary Organization with teams of Special Government Employees.

And USDS's new mandate is a Software Modernization Initiative, not technically a budget directive, so the mission of USDS has not changed.

Finally, the president does have authority to share classified info with anyone at any time. The President and only the President is the ultimate classificarion authority (because classification is justified under constitutional provisions for foreign policy, I guess).

Whether this EO gives Elon the right to dismantle USAID is probably subject to controversy, but on the points you are pushing the Trump Admin has already thought of and dismissed your objections.

What the Trump administration is trying to do with this executive order is unlikely to hold up in court. Wether anything is actually paused at that point is another story.

Lets say your interpretation of the EO is correct. It is still illegal for him to be making financial decisions, firing people and unilaterally canceling spending explicitly earmarked by congress.

Firing is likely not illegal and Humphery’s executor ought to be overturned.

Again specifics matter on the financial spending. We cannot blanket say what is or is not illegal.

The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups.

They literally never denied a payment in their entire career.

Not even once.

The main job of the US Fiscal Service (the agency of the US Treasury that Musk and his staff have rooted) is to make payments which have been authorised by other parts of the government. Given Musk is tweeting first and asking questions later, what he almost certainly means here is that (for example) when the SSA tells the Fiscal Service who to pay Social Security benefits to retirees, the Fiscal Service doesn't run any additional checks beyond the ones already run by the SSA. In the case of Social Security, this is obviously the right thing to do - the government should be paying Social Security to otherwise-eligible retirees who are suspected terrorists. It's not just a good idea, it's the law. Whether the Fiscal Service should be acting as a second line of defence to deny payment if e.g. the Department of Defence contracts with a local ally who might be a terrorist is a legitimate question about how to organise the government, with "no" being a perfectly reasonable answer.

There are two plausible stories for what is going on here:

  • The benign one is that Musk got read-only access to the database, which he wanted because downloading the entire database of US government disbursements (including payee, date, amount, and source of authorisation) is the easiest way to do what he wants to do with @DOGE (as opposed to the DOGE established by Trump's executive order, which is something else) and the Fiscal Service was the easiest way to get the data.

  • The malign one is that Musk wants to control the Fiscal Service because Musk and/or Trump are planning to cut spending at the bill is paid, not the point where the expense is incurred. (This is consistent with the way Trump ran the Trump organisation until he tanked his credit rating, and is also something Musk did at Twitter). A world where (even if an invoice is approved for payment by the government department who bought the thing) @DOGE is arbitrarily blocking payments because they don't like the politics of the payee is a world where nobody competent will want to contract with the government. And if the same stunt is pulled with Social Security payments, federal payroll, or heaven forfend bond interest, the results are catastrophic. Trump and Musk are reckless enough, and Trump has joked about defaulting on the debt, so I can't rule out the possibility that the plan is to default on the federal debt, and that taking control of the Fiscal Service is the way to forestall a legal challenge.

I can understand that there's arguments that can be made as to why payments would be automatically approved, sure, but then it begs the question: why is the government paying "payment approval officers"? Couldn't the process just assume these are automatically approved? Why is someone in the loop if their job is to pass along paper?

Why is someone in the loop if their job is to pass along paper?

Why indeed. I highly recommend that people on this forum read Musk's biography by Walter Isaacson. I see a lot of people who are confused by what Musk does and it would help them to not be confused.

Musk's whole method of improving systems is to break into the parts of the system that others gloss over.

For example, at Tesla, they bought a machine to do something. The machine is really slow. So Musk asks the guy running the machine why it is so slow. Guy doesn't know. Musk asks for it to be speed up. The guy doesn't know how. So he finds someone who does know. They open up the machine and speed it up +300%. It doesn't work. They dial it down to +200%. Now it works and the throughput is 3x what it was before.

99.9% of people would have treated the machine like a black box. And that's what people are doing here with the government. No one really knows how the government works, even our resident lawyers. It's far too complicated. So they treat it like a black box. Congress appropriates money. The Treasury spends it.

Okay, but like, who, actually spends it? Who signs the checks? Who is the actual person who processes the payment?

I am virtually certain that Musk's process here will uncover a bunch of fraud and waste. And that's why some people are so desperate to stop it.

A world where (even if an invoice is approved for payment by the government department who bought the thing) @DOGE is arbitrarily blocking payments because they don't like the politics of the payee is a world where nobody competent will want to contract with the government.

This very much seems like a win-win for right-wing populists, Trump, and Musk. They all broadly hate the government, so trashing its credibility provides fodder for them to say "Look! See how bad it is!" antics. People will state the obvious that it's particularly bad now because they're trashing it, but they'll just say "Legacy Media lies!" and ignore it.

The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups.

Did he give any examples of these fraudulent and terrorist transactions? Is the Treasury even in a position to stop payments from being made? My understanding is that those issues need to be resolved at the agency level:

The Treasury payment system already runs through several computerized filters, including the “Do Not Pay” system that stops money from going to ineligible recipients such as dead people and known terrorists. There is also a debt-offset system that can prevent payments from going to people who owe child support or back taxes, said Don Hammond, who ran Treasury’s payment system in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Hammond said that federal agencies are responsible for determining who is eligible to receive money. Those agencies then send the payment information to the Treasury Department, which makes bank deposits and wire transfers.

Did he give any examples of these fraudulent and terrorist transactions?

Musk falsely identified payments made before 20th Jan 2025 to Lutheran Family Services for their work on legal Biden administration refugee resettlement programmes as "these illegal payments", but otherwise no.

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