DOGE’s access to Treasury data risks US financial standing and raises security worries, experts warn

WASHINGTON – The Department of Government Efficiency’s embed into the federal government has raised a host of concerns, transforming a debate over how to cut government waste into a confrontation over privacy rights and the nation’s financial standing in the world.
DOGE, spearheaded by billionaire Donald Trump donor Elon Musk, has rapidly burrowed deep into federal agencies and taken drastic actions to cut spending. This includes trying to get rid of thousands of federal workers, shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development and accessing the Treasury Department’s enormous payment systems.
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Advocacy groups and labor unions have filed lawsuits in an attempt to save agencies and federal worker jobs, and five former treasury secretaries are sounding the alarm on the risks associated with Musk’s DOGE accessing sensitive Treasury Department payment systems and potentially stopping congressionally authorized payments.
“Any hint of the selective suspension of congressionally authorized payments will be a breach of trust and ultimately, a form of default. And our credibility, once lost, will prove difficult to regain,” said former treasury secretaries Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew and Janet Yellen in an op-ed in The New York Times on Monday.
They warn about the risks of “arbitrary and capricious political control of federal payments, which would be unlawful and corrosive to our democracy.”
Musk said on his social media platform X on Monday that “we need to stop government spending like a drunken sailor on fraud & waste or America is gonna go bankrupt. That does mean a lot of grifters will lose their grift and complain loudly about it. Too bad. Deal with it.”
Experts in the financial and digital privacy worlds warn that the U.S. financial system is delicate and complicated and could be harmed by unilateral moves. They also say that Americans’ personal information could be compromised by the unsafe handling of sensitive data.
Andrew Metrick, director of the Yale Program on Financial Stability, says DOGE’s actions as a “go fast and break things group” pose a danger to the U.S. financial system and the U.S. dollar’s standing as the world’s reserve currency.
On the issue of cutting government programs or potentially undermining U.S. democratic norms, DOGE is “not going to care, but they should care about harming the dollar and harming the safety of U.S. government debt,” Metrick said.
Crossing the Rubicon of danger would be something perceived as a default event on bonds, Metrick said, especially as the U.S. runs very close to its statutory debt limit.
“We maintain a complicated financial system — a few wrong actions and the world loses confidence in our ability to manage that system.