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Forbidden Treasure
It looks like Elon Musk and his buddies have forced another US official out of government.
The Washington Post reports that senior Department of the Treasury official David Lebryk abruptly announced his retirement on Friday, after clashing with Musk’s allies at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Lebryk has worked at the agency for decades. Since the election, according to the report, DOGE has hounded him for access to the Treasury’s sensitive payment system, which is used to send out trillions of dollars every year and is normally accessed only by a small number of senior officials.
Why Lebryk clashed over the requests is unclear. But maybe he just didn’t like the idea of handing over the keys for a trillion-dollar money pipeline to Musk — a walking conflict of interest — and his retinue of sketchy and underqualified DOGE lackeys.
Feds Will Roll
Musk fueled Trump’s election victory by promising to gut federal agencies and drastically slash government spending. In the process, he’s made no secret of his intentions to punish his political foes.
On the day of Trump’s inauguration, the chief of the Federal Aviation Administration, Mike Whitaker, resigned. Musk had openly called for Whitaker’s resignation for months, because under his leadership, the FAA temporarily halted Musk’s rocket launches at his company SpaceX on several occasions over safety concerns, slapping on fines.
Considering those interventions were usually in response to a rocket exploding somewhere, you could say that the FAA was simply doing its job rather than trying to sabotage SpaceX, whose Starship rockets seem to have no problem blowing up on their own without any malicious influence.
But maybe Musk isn’t interested in the proper functioning of government — not when pesky regulators get in the way of his company’s progress.
Up to No Good
Lebryk’s departure is expected to be a shock to the Treasury’s rank and file, according to WaPo.
It’s hard to say what Musk and DOGE’s intentions are with accessing the Treasury’s payment system, which is used to distribute everything from Social Security and Medicare benefits to the salaries of federal employees. A detail we hope won’t prove relevant is that Musk got his start in developing a payment system, PayPal, and has strived to integrate a money transferring service into his social media site X, in a bid to turn it into an “everything app.”
What’s seems clear, however, is that the intentions are cynical.
“Your whole job is to pay the bills as they’re due,” Mark Mazur, a former Treasury official who served during the Obama and Biden administrations, told WaPo. “It’s never been used in a way to execute a partisan agenda… You have to really put bad intentions in place for that to be the case.”
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