Liberal Currents – Elizabeth Popp Berman: “On Friday night [January 31, 2025], Elon Musk’s team gained access to the Department of Treasury’s payments system, which processes the federal spending that makes up more than a fifth of the U.S. economy. Social Security, Medicare, agricultural supports, the National Parks—a large majority of government spending flows through this spigot. Musk’s team not only has the ability to see every government payment, but can make changes to the system—which could mean having the capacity to turn that spigot off. What Musk appears to be attempting is using the payments system to decide what congressionally approved spending will actually occur. If that happens, it will take our unfolding constitutional crisis to a whole new level. Normally, the federal payments system is apolitical plumbing managed by nonpartisan bureaucrats. Those bureaucrats simply process funds; they don’t make decisions about whether spending is justified. But they have immense unused power, because controlling the federal spigot means they have the capacity to stop any government payment with the push of a button, even if they have never done so. With Musk at the reins, that power shifts to an unelected billionaire who intends to use it. Don’t like “woke” research? Turn it off. Hate USAID? Cut off the money. Think payments to Lutheran Family Services are illegal? Shut them down. Giving a single individual, let alone one with no official position, such control over the federal government would be extraordinarily authoritarian. the use of such power, but they are only one check. Apolitical employees, whose only obligation is to the law, are another safeguard. We also rely on the technical infrastructure itself to ensure that payments happen without disruption. Mucking about with systems that are built on sixty-year-old code could be deeply disruptive to vital government functions, shutting down the Social Security payments many rely on or cutting off payments to small businesses that depend on government contracts for survival. Trump has already demonstrated his intent to gut parts of government that threaten him or depart from his political allies’ interests or ideology. He has moved toward purging the FBI of independent voices, tried to prohibit funding for whole fields of study, and temporarily halted congressionally approved spending on clean energy…”