The richest person in the world, Elon Musk, has sparked new controversy against the treasury department after a judge restricts his Department of Government Efficiency from accessing sensitive data.
According to Times of India, the US District Judge Paul Engelmayer on the lawsuit filed by 19 Democratic state attorneys general ordered to immediately block Musk and Doge access to the personal financial data of Americans.
Following the judge's orders, Musk took to his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) to respond back with some controversial allegations against the treasury department.
He accused, “Yesterday (Friday), I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlement 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.”
“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 complaint minimisation. People we receive money from don’t complain, but people who don’t receive money (especially fraudsters) complain very loudly, so the fraud was allowed to continue,” he wrote.
Musk also revealed that DOGE and the treasury department have agreed on measures to improve money tracking, including adding special codes to all payments for successful audits, but he also claimed that many transactions are still missing, making it difficult to keep track of the money.
