Joshua Sukoff/Medill News Service/Sipa USA via AP Images
As Treasury secretary nominee, Scott Bessent testifies before the Senate Committee on Finance, January 16, 2025, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
Evidence grows daily that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been evasive and dishonest about the ongoing effort by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team to gain access to the federal payments system. More on what the world’s richest man and his gang of neo-Nazi coders have been up to below.
But first: Even if Bessent were telling the truth about the extent of DOGE’s annexation of Treasury—currently hamstrung, but not defeated, by litigation—he ought to be impeached. Put simply, Bessent has aided and abetted an active coup attempt by enabling an unelected far-right ideologue and his unaccountable DOGE minions to interfere with Treasury infrastructure that’s needed to distribute roughly $6 trillion in public funds each year, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, tax refunds, payments to government workers, and more.
Bessent’s empowerment of Musk’s despotic wrecking crew is “incompatible with the purpose and function of” his office. Thus, it is an impeachable offense. That Bessent appears to have lied about his knowledge of and involvement in Musk’s Treasury raid—his public statements about DOGE’s covert operations at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service have been contradicted more than once by credible reporting and court filings—gives House Democrats even more reason to pursue impeachment.
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Now, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) have recently proposed legislation to prevent Musk’s team from tampering with Treasury’s payments system. But as long as Republicans control both chambers of Congress, that bill will never see the light of day—and in any case, many DOGE actions are already almost certainly illegal, rendering its usefulness questionable even if it could pass. In contrast, motions to impeach are privileged, meaning that if House Democrats made such a move, they would at least be able to lay out the case against Bessent in a public forum—and compel House Republicans to go on the record in support of Musk’s illegal takeover.
Unlike doomed legislation, a privileged impeachment motion against Bessent could help keep Musk’s power grab in the spotlight—forcing members of Congress to choose a side, and stimulating greater public opposition to President Donald Trump and his hatchet man Musk’s shared fascist agenda.
To be clear, impeaching Bessent is a very long shot. It would require Democrats to vote in unison while flipping at least two Republicans, given the GOP’s 218-215 House majority. Given the extent to which contemporary Republican lawmakers have embraced their party’s turn toward imposing unpopular right-wing priorities through anti-democratic means, as well as their abject deference to Musk, it’s hard to imagine. Convicting Bessent is practically impossible, as it would require 66 votes in the Senate—all 47 members of the Democratic caucus plus 19 Republicans.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t negate the value of trying. Voters want to see congressional Democrats fighting for them. Even if Democrats wage losing battles in the short term, that can still contribute to victory in the long run. In this case, making it clear that there is nothing bipartisan about Trump and Musk’s dismantling of the government and pillaging of society could help win back disaffected segments of the electorate in 2026 and 2028. If Democrats can show that the current attacks on science, social protections, and the public good—and all of the deadly consequences that flow from that—are wholly Republican affairs, they could win back alienated working-class voters and discredit MAGA’s chainsaw movement for generations.
And it would also show Republicans who enjoy socially mixed company, as Bessent does, the reputational risks of collaborating with the likes of Musk and Trump. Sixteen members of the Democratic caucus voted to confirm Bessent, presumably because he had a sheen of normalcy. It needs to be made clear that such reputations can and will evaporate if people become Muskrats.
The Case Against Bessent
The Trump administration has made a series of misleading and inconsistent claims about what Musk’s DOGE team is up to at Treasury, including both its goals and activities. To hear the White House, Bessent, and other Treasury officials tell it, Musk and his associates are merely trying to “save taxpayers money” by identifying “fraud” and “waste.”
But Musk, who pledged to help Trump cut at least $2 trillion in annual federal spending, continues to admit tacitly that the endgame is to give the White House veto power over the disbursement of legislatively approved funding; to take away Congress’s power of the purse and hand it to the executive branch. And Trump continues to praise Musk’s efforts to help him gain unilateral authority over spending decisions.
At the center of this saga is Bessent, who is almost certainly aware that Musk and Trump wanted Treasury to impound funds. On January 31, Bessent granted DOGE agents access to the federal payments system. Bessent made that move after ousting David Lebryk, the former longtime Treasury official who had refused to comply with requests for access made by Tom Krause—a tech executive, private equity buzzard, and DOGE operative at the agency.
According to The New York Times, one week before DOGE gained access to the federal payments system, Treasury Chief of Staff Dan Katz sent an email telling other officials at the department that “Mr. Krause and his team needed access to the system so they could pause USAID payments and comply with Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order to halt foreign aid.” Lebryk pushed back, disputing the legality of suspending payments. That prompted a response from Krause, who told Lebryk to consider the legal consequences of continuing to disburse payments in violation of Trump’s directives.
Katz and Krause’s messages are at odds with subsequent arguments made by Treasury (on February 4) and Bessent (on February 5 and February 6) that DOGE agents were given access to the federal payments system to evaluate its “operational efficiency”—not to stop the flow of money to programs opposed by Trump and Musk.
According to Bloomberg, Bessent and Krause reportedly talked about “the very mission in which DOGE is now engaged” back in December, when Bessent interviewed Krause while assembling his future Treasury staff. Furthermore, in the weeks leading up to Inauguration Day, members of Trump’s transition team, including some DOGE associates, reportedly asked Treasury officials about the inner workings of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, including the mechanics of blocking certain payments. And in late January, Krause and 25-year-old eugenicist Marko Elez, then a DOGE agent, “traveled to a federal facility in Kansas City to meet with the agency staff there responsible for the payment system,” and “they also sought access to the underlying code,” Bloomberg reported.
So, despite Bessent’s recent arguments that DOGE is pursuing an innocuous audit, it appears that he was well aware of the parallel institution’s money-pausing objectives when he greenlit its access to Treasury’s payments system on January 31.
In addition, Bessent appears to have lied about who has had access to what, when, and why. Contrary to the Trump administration’s protestations, there have been multiple reports that Elez had “administrator-level” access to parts of Treasury’s payments system between February 1 and February 5 and that he made “extensive changes” to the source code. If that’s true, it undermines claims from the White House and Treasury. Moreover, if the reporting cited above is accurate, Bessent’s February 6 contention that no DOGE agents ever had the ability to make changes to the system would also be false.
Eventually, an official from the Bureau of the Fiscal Service admitted in a February 11 affidavit that Elez had temporarily been given “read/write permissions instead of read-only” on one part of Treasury’s payments system, though the official’s argument that this was done “mistakenly” and without Elez’s awareness strains credulity.
During his February 6 interview with Bloomberg, Bessent also stated that nobody at Treasury had attempted to block any payments. But that, too, appears to be untrue.
Krause said in a February 11 affidavit that he is “responsible, among other duties, for reducing and eliminating improper and fraudulent payments; waste, fraud, and abuse; and improving the accuracy of financial reporting” (emphasis added). According to Krause: “As soon as I arrived at the Treasury Department, I met with Treasury leadership to begin operationalizing the Treasury DOGE Team’s work. This early work at Treasury included … ensuring that the Treasury DOGE Team was leveraging its unique technological expertise to help operationalize the president’s policy priorities for the early days of the administration, including by helping identify payments that may be improper under his new executive orders” (emphasis added).
Again, Bessent vetted Krause in December, during which the two men reportedly discussed DOGE’s Treasury plans. Therefore, any claims of ignorance on Bessent’s part would be far-fetched.
Finally, Bessent continues to support DOGE in the face of legal challenges. Despite numerous requests from Democratic lawmakers for a full accounting of DOGE’s meddling in Treasury’s payments system—and an explanation of why, and under what authority, Bessent granted members of Musk’s austerity squad access—Bessent has so far refused to cooperate. Treasury’s February 4 letter was so lacking that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said that it “reeks of a cover-up.”
Not only has Bessent ducked Democratic members of Congress, he has also continued to collaborate with DOGE even in the face of legal challenges. For instance, we learned in a February 9 affidavit submitted by Krause that Bessent had, on February 5, tapped him to perform the duties of Treasury’s fiscal assistant secretary. That was two days after the first relevant lawsuit had been filed. While Krause claimed in the aforementioned court filing that he had “not yet assumed those duties,” he was nevertheless chosen to take over responsibilities that until January 31 belonged to Lebryk. This suggests a complete willingness on Bessent’s part to work in concert with DOGE.
It’s worth stressing here that even if the Trump administration’s repeated assertions that DOGE agents have had “read-only” access to Treasury’s payments system were true—and there’s plenty of reason to doubt they are—that wouldn’t make Bessent’s actions defensible. Giving an unelected multi-centibillionaire and his hand-picked, right-wing toadies “read-only” access to the federal payments system presents ample opportunities for potentially catastrophic malfeasance.
Meanwhile, since a pair of federal judges have issued, clarified, and extended a temporary restraining order barring DOGE affiliates from accessing Treasury’s federal payments system, DOGE agent Gavin Kliger has taken Musk’s Treasury battle to new territory: the Internal Revenue Service. Notably, Bessent had already signaled in his February 6 interview with Bloomberg that he would “consider” granting Musk’s team access to the IRS if requested.
Our data, our economy, and our democracy are at risk, especially given the proven ineptitude of the ostensible whiz kids working for Musk. Bessent is seemingly working for Musk, too. In Bessent’s words: “Elon and I are completely aligned in terms of cutting waste and increasing accountability and transparency for the American people. I believe that this DOGE program, in my adult life, is one of the most important audits of government or changes to government structure we have seen.” Bessent even surmised that federal spending might decrease “because of everything we’re doing right now,” and on February 18, he called DOGE’s risible claim to have “saved” some $50 billion “a very good start.”
It’s time for House Democrats to make a privileged motion to impeach Bessent for helping Musk and his fellow budget scolds commandeer critical Treasury infrastructure. Frankly, it’s past time, and if they don’t act soon, the looting is likely to get worse.
Bessent Is Part of a Broader Crisis
Of course, Bessent is far from alone among Trump appointees working hand in glove with Musk. In early February, for instance, Energy Secretary Chris Wright reportedly granted DOGE agent Luke Farritor, a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern, access to the Energy Department’s IT system despite opposition from some members of the department’s general counsel and chief information offices. Soon after, Wright fired hundreds of employees tasked with managing the country’s nuclear arsenal—and attempted to quickly rehire them once lawmakers conveyed the gravity of the situation.
Last week, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced without a hint of irony that he was inviting private-sector consultants—starting with Musk’s firm, SpaceX—to help “deliver a new, world-class air traffic control system that will be the envy of the world.” Duffy’s announcement came about 48 hours after he fired hundreds of Federal Aviation Administration workers, including those who maintain air traffic control infrastructure, on Trump and Musk’s orders. It comes as no surprise that these mass firings, per Revolving Door Project research, have apparently coincided with a marked increase in air travel fatalities. But now Duffy is inviting Musk to “fix” a problem that he seemingly caused.
As DOGE wraps its tentacles around more and more parts of the federal government, collaboration between Trump’s cabinet members and Musk’s smash-and-grab operation is likely to grow stronger.
Making an example of Bessent would be a good start. Eventually, every Trump official who assists Musk in the ransacking of the United States should be made to answer for acting in ways “incompatible with the purpose and function of” their offices.
