Inside DOGE’s Plan to Invade the Treasury—and Throttle USAID

Records show that in the final days of January, a request was placed to grant Elez access to both systems. On January 31, David Lebryk, who had been acting Treasury secretary and at one point was the commissioner of BFS, abruptly announced he would retire after he had been placed on administrative leave for refusing to provide DOGE with access to these payment systems. For those who knew the Treasury intimately, this set off alarm bells. That same day, according to an attachment provided by the government, at 6:07 PM, a ticket was filed disregarding a previous order just a day before to give Elez just read only access: “sorry read/write is needed.”

At the same time Lebryk stepped away, DOGE gained access to the entirety of USAID’s IT systems and network, according to reporting from ProPublica. The next day, as the dismantling of USAID was underway, according to court documents, Elez was granted access to the source codes of ASAP, SPS, and PAM. He was also granted read-only access to the production database for the SPS and PAM.

People with knowledge of Treasury systems tell WIRED that it would be uncommon, if not “unheard of,” for a BFS employee to have access to all these systems simultaneously.

“Within Fiscal, the mainframe guys don’t have write access to the databases and vice versa,” says a former BFS employee who requested anonymity in order to speak freely. Normally, they say, employees at BFS are given the minimum amount of access to systems required to do their jobs. “No BFS employee would normally have this kind of access.”

According to an affidavit from another top Treasury official, though, that plan to isolate USAID payment files outlined by Garber was temporarily paused for the next several days—the State Department had decided it would instead intercept the files. However, on February 4 and February 5, USAID payments flowed to the PAM portal designed by Garber’s team.

That same affidavit outlined the next steps: BFS was instructed to focus on flagging, quarantining, and sending several payments to State officials that fell under President Donald Trump’s foreign aid executive order that stated there would be a 90-day pause on this aid as the State Department reviewed each program. This plan, according to an email chain included in one of the lawsuits, was vetted by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was “comfortable proceeding.” These payments, which originated from the Department of Health and Human Services, included funding for “Refugee and Entrant Assistance,” “Gifts and Donations Office of Refugee Resettlement,” and “Refugee Resettlement Assistance.”

By then, Musk had doubled down on his contempt for USAID: In a February 2 post on X, Musk wrote, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”

DOGE operatives, including Luke Farritor, a young member, had gained “super administrator” access to USAID’s systems, according to ProPublica. Farritor, who had also been at the Department of Health and Human Services as well as the General Services Administration (GSA), was reportedly going through USAID’s payment system manually, shutting off agency funding, according to the Washington Post. Elez was in the midst of a similar operation in Kansas City: according to that Treasury official’s affidavit, the engineer began to manually identify and review the foreign aid payment files that had been sequestered in the folder Garber outlined in that late January email.