DOGE Finds $4.7 Trillion In Virtually Untraceable Treasury Payments

This past Monday, February 17^th, in a stunning revelation that should sober up every American citizen, the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) revealed its finding that an unbelievable $4.7 trillion in disbursements by the US Treasury are "almost impossible" to trace, thanks to a rampant disregard for the basic accounting practice of using of tracking codes when dispensing funding.

Even more disturbing is that it’s not as if a federal tracking system wasn't already in place -- it simply went casually unused for all sorts of payouts adding up to an almost unfathomable $4.7 trillion. Without Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) identification codes associated with those payouts, there's little hope in figuring out where all that money went. 

"In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible," DOGE announced via its X account. Thanks to DOGE, those "optional" days are over. “As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going," DOGE added. 

Considering financial abuses DOGE has also discovered in the Departments of Health, Defense, and Education this figure could easily reach beyond the $6 trillion dollar mark. Even more disconcerting is the fact that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the United States will have a $6.1 trillion deficit for this upcoming fiscal year,despite record receipts of $17 trillion and declining unemployment.  

With the national debt currently at an unbelievable $36 trillion dollars, the ramifications and implications of these disclosures are truly revelatory when one considers how these savings could easily eliminate the entirety of our national debt within a six to ten year window.  Hopefully, these disclosures aren't too late to rectify this gross negligence.

As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has correctly stated, the United States does not have a revenue problem; it has a spending problem. The CBO expects annual outlays of $23 trillion in the 2026-29 period.   If this is the case, what we do know is that no revenue measure will eliminate the deficit.  The United States’ government has implemented numerous tax increases in the past decades and the national debt continues to reach record levels. Additionally, when revenues rise, governments spend even more than before.

The US spending problem comes from a completely unsustainable increase in mandatory spending, which is never audited and simply rises without control. Mandatory spending is expected to increase to $14 trillion per annum.

Earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pushed back on portrayals of DOGE employees as reckless rogues. "These are highly trained professionals," he told Bloomberg. "This is not some roving band going around doing things. This is methodical and it is going to yield big savings."

On Sunday, Feb. 16^th, Musk said DOGE might be on the trail of “the biggest fraud in history, as SSA data appears to show that 20.789 million Americans over the age of 100 are collecting Social Security retirement benefits. That includes 12 million who are purportedly over 120 years old. .

Bent on derailing DOGE, Democrats have sued to prevent the organization from accessing federal data associated with the Office of Personnel Management, and the Health and Human Services, Education, Energy, Transportation, Labor and Commerce departments. However, on Monday an Obama appointed federal judge handling the request for a restraining order denied the motion, noting the states filing for the order had failed to show any irreparable harm by the audits and also noting how their ‘evidence’ was largely based upon media speculation about potential harms springing from DOGE’s activities. 

The Nature of the Beast

As Jeffrey Tucker from The Brownstone Institute notes, it is still unclear just how much authority President Trump  truly exercises over the sprawling executive branch. 

For that matter, no one can even agree on how large this branch is: between 2.2 million and 3 million employees and somewhere between 400 and 450 agencies. The financial bleed in this realm is unthinkable and far worse than even the biggest cynic can imagine.

Five former secretaries of the Treasury Department  took to the pages of the New York Times with a shocking claim. “The nation’s payment system has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants.”

This has included a career employee called “fiscal assistant secretary—a post that for the prior eight decades had been reserved exclusively for civil servants to ensure impartiality and public confidence in the handling and payment of federal funds.”

There is no reason even to read between the lines: What this means is that no person voted into office by the people and no one appointed by such a person has had access to the federal books since 1946.

This is startling beyond belief. No owner of any company would ever tolerate being barred from the accounting offices and payment systems. And no company can offer any public stock without independent audits and open books.

And yet almost 80 years have gone by during which time neither has been true for this gigantic enterprise called the federal government. That means that $193 trillion has been spent by an institution that has never faced granulated oversight from the people and never met the normal demands that every enterprise faces each day.

Let that thought sink in.

The usual habit in Washington has been to treat every elected leader and their appointments as temporary and transitory marionettes, people who come and go and disturb little to nothing about the normal operations of government.

This new administration seems to have every intention to change that, but the job is inconceivably challenging. As much public support as /MAHA/DOGE enjoy for now, and as many people from those groups are getting embedded in the power structure, they are outnumbered and outmaneuvered by millions of agents of the old order. 

This transition will not be easy if it happens at all, which is why vigilance and transparency are critical,  

The inertia of the old order is mighty. But hopefully that will change quickly and for the better as people come to realize that rather than living in a democracy (or more accurately, a federal/republic) the power of the purse strings has  been held for far too long by neither Congress nor the President, so much as by an un-elected bureaucracy.

The question Tucker cogently poses for each of us to answer is this: How in the world does anyone think that having an unelected and unmonitored elite with permanent positions to oversee the nation's accounting, with protection from federal judges, is a good system of government?"

The U.S. Supreme Court is going to have to rule soon on if there can be an actual President elected by the people, or if this whole voting thing is just a fake veneer covering a permanent government.

As an aside, here is a dispatch written by one of the DOGE personnel and posted when one of the Biden appointed federal judges suspended the audit:

THE MACHINE FIGHTS BACK

When DOGE found empty fields in Treasury's payment system, they uncovered more than missing data. They found a mechanism.  Simple things were left blank: Payment categories • Payment rationales • Basic audit controls.  The kind of fields any small business would require. The kind that let you track where money goes. The kind that stop a billion dollars of fraud. Every week.

Here's what Treasury didn't want exposed:  Over $100 billion flowing annually to accounts without Social Security numbers. No temporary ID numbers. No verification. Nothing. When Musk asked Treasury officials how much was "unequivocal and obvious fraud," the answer revealed decades of corruption: Half.

Let that sink in. $50 billion per year.  A billion dollars every week disappearing into accounts that shouldn't exist.  The kind of fraud that would shut down any bank in America. The kind that would land any business owner in federal prison.

But Treasury had perfected its system:  Process payments •  Ignore controls - Keep the machine running. Late last week, something shifted.  A judge's order appeared, ex parte - meaning only one side could speak. No warning. No defense allowed. Just a wall erected between Treasury officials and their own department's data.

Look at the numbers. Really look at them. Treasury bleeds 23.87% of its budget to waste, fraud, and abuse.  Almost a quarter, vanishing into what auditors politely call "mismanagement." More than Labor at 11%. More than Veterans Affairs at 10%. More than Agriculture at 9%. More than Defense Department's 1.85%. More than Homeland Security's 0.89%.

A pattern emerges. The deeper you go into Treasury's operations, the more the waste grows. The more controls vanish. The more fraud flourishes. Until now.  "Everything at Treasury was geared towards complaint minimization," Musk revealed after meeting with officials. Not accuracy. Not accountability. Not protecting taxpayer dollars. Just keeping the machine quiet.

This wasn't incompetence. This was design. Previous management had built a perfect system: Let the fraudsters complain. Let them threaten. Let them pressure. Easier to process bad payments than face their wrath. Think about that calculation. A billion dollars of fraud every week was deemed less costly than dealing with complaints from people gaming the system.

That's how machines like this protect themselves. Not through efficiency. Not through good management. But through the path of least resistance. Through empty fields and missing controls and payments without Social Security numbers. Through a quarter of their budget disappearing into the void.

Until someone starts asking where it goes.

The system's response was swift. Coordinated. Precise. Democratic state attorneys general filed suit. Not about the fraud. Not about the waste. Not about billions vanishing into accounts without SSNs. But about "protecting" the Treasury Department from its own Secretary.

A judge in New York responded with something unprecedented: an ex parte order blocking Treasury officials from accessing their own department's data. No warning. No chance to respond. No opportunity to present evidence. Just a wall between the people elected to fix the system and the system itself.

Think about what that means: The Secretary of the Treasury —effectively the CFO of the United States government—legally barred from seeing how money moves through his own department. The people's appointee blocked from viewing the people's accounts. Young coders mapping the missing controls ordered to stop looking.

The MACHINE has judges. Has lawyers. Has media. Has entire states moving in coordination. But here's what makes this time different: The DOGE clock keeps ticking.

$74 billion saved and counting. Each number representing not just dollars, but holes in the machine.  Gaps in the armor. Places where light gets in.

They can file motions. Can issue orders. Can build blockades. But they can't make those empty fields disappear. Can't hide a quarter of Treasury's budget vanishing into the void. Can't stop what happens when people finally see truth.

This isn't about spreadsheets anymore. This isn't about waste or controls or management. This is about who controls the machine. Because when you find something like empty fields in Treasury's payment system, you're not just finding missing data. You're finding purpose. When basic controls sit blank while billions vanish weekly, that's not incompetence. That's design.

The machine is fighting back. But this time, it's fighting years and years and years of gathered light. Now activated