Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency team said personnel at the Treasury Department suspect roughly $1 billion a week of entitlement payments are "unequivocal and obvious fraud."
Amid lawsuits and vocal protests over his efforts, Musk proceeded with President Donald Trump's plan to weed out government inefficiency and wasteful spending.
The billionaire tech mogul now claims to have uncovered several "extremely suspicious" activities at the U.S. Treasury.
On his social media platform X, Musk posted on Saturday: "To be clear, what the @DOGE team and @USTreasury have jointly agreed makes sense is the following:
"- Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible.
"- All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!
"- The DO-NOT-PAY list of entities known to be fraudulent or people who are dead or are probable fronts for terrorist organizations or do not match Congressional appropriations must actually be implemented and not ignored. Also, it can currently take up to a year to get on this list, which is far too long. This list should be updated at least weekly, if not daily," he continued.
"The above super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees, not anyone from @DOGE. It is ridiculous that these changes didn't exist already!
"Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious.
"When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!! This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately.
"This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately," Musk concluded.
He wrote in a subsequent post: "Nobody in Treasury management cared enough before. I do want to credit the working level people in Treasury who have wanted to do this for many years, but have been stopped by prior management.
"Everything at Treasury was geared towards complain minimization. People we receive money don't complain, but people who don't receive money (especially fraudsters) complain very loudly, so the fraud was allowed to continue."
On Friday, Trump commended Musk and his DOGE team, saying, "He's finding tremendous fraud and corruption and waste. You see it with the USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development], but you're going to see it even more so with other agencies and other parts of government."
James Morley III ✉
James Morley III is a writer with more than two decades of experience in entertainment, travel, technology, and science and nature.
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