WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Treasury’s payment system won’t be touched by Elon Musk’s government efficiency team, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox Business on Wednesday, adding that any decisions to stop payments would be made by other agencies.
The Treasury on Tuesday said Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency had been granted “read-only access” to its payment system codes but denied that this cut off any government payments including for Social Security or Medicare.
Bessent said a study was being done aimed at creating more accountability, more accuracy and more traceability to ensure money disbursed by Treasury was going where intended, but payments themselves were “not being touched.”
Any changes to government disbursements would be made by other agencies, not through the Treasury’s payments system.
“In terms of payments being stopped, that is happening upstream at the department level,” he added.
But Bessent lauded Musk’s efforts to cut government spending and said “DOGE is not going to fail,” unlike previous government efficiency drives such as the Grace Commission in the 1980s and efforts during Bill Clinton’s administration in the 1990s.
This was partly because Musk, the CEO of Tesla and the founder of rocket company SpaceX, is “the greatest entrepreneur of this generation,” Bessent said, adding that DOGE was already making some “status quo” interests in Washington unhappy.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and David Lawder, Editing by Franklin Paul and Sam Holmes)
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