Donald Trump seems to have humbled Elon Musk with a blunt message while signing executive orders.
It looks like the new US president has taken the richest man in the world down a peg or two.
This is after it was revealed that Musk had been granted full access to the Treasury’s federal payment system.
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The Tesla boss was recently appointed as the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
While DOGE isn’t actually a governmental department, it has been said that it will act as an outside advisor on federal spending, with Musk claiming that he will make trillions of dollars worth of cuts.
While it’s not yet known what Musk might do with this new power, he has already been making claims about the department on his own social media platform X, formerly Twitter.
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The Tesla boss wrote: “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.”
Now, it looks like Trump is attempting to bring Musk into line while speaking to press yesterday (February 3).
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The president said: “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we’ll give him the approval where appropriate. Where not appropriate, we won’t.”
However, so far it seems that every demand made by DOGE has been met.
According to The New York Times, David Lebryk, a top civil servant in the Treasury Department, was removed from his position after refusing to give DOGE access to the department’s payment system.
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As a result, it was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who granted ended up granting Musk access.
Since then, fears have grown that the billionaire could potentially now have access to confidential information from every single taxpayer in the country, including social security numbers and Medicare benefit payments.
It has also been reported that Musk is reccomending that Treasury payment positions are taken up by people appointed by Trump.
Speaking to The Rolling Stone, Nathan Tankus, who is the research director of the Modern Money Network, said: “This is not the attitude of people who are simply trying to make the payment system more ‘efficient’.
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“They have a very clear and specific agenda, which involves unilaterally cutting spending, particularly spending they perceive to be going to their ideological foes.”