I want to return to a subject that has been pushed a bit out of the headlines over the last few days: the DOGE story at the Treasury’s Bureau of Fiscal Service (BFS). Late yesterday afternoon the government filed a series of declarations from Treasury Department civil servants providing details to a federal judge in New York about what happened. The biggest news turns on USAID payments.
We’d heard from the Times a few days ago that what was motivating this whole effort at Treasury was that they wanted to block USAID payments. We’d first heard almost two weeks ago that a senior Treasury civil servant, David A. Lebryk, had resigned rather than assist in blocking payments. But everything we’d heard to date is that intentions notwithstanding, no blocking or interfering had actually happened. But according to these new documents that’s not true. The declaration of Treasury civil servant Vona S. Robinson says that in fact multiple payments were temporarily put on hold before being reviewed at the State Department and eventually cleared for payment and one was rejected altogether (see Robinson, paragraphs 13 and 14).
I had reported last week that the whole point of what the since-resigned DOGE operative Marko Elez was doing at BFS was “creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked.” And these new documents show that that did in fact happen. Using layman’s terms a new pathway was created in which payments that higher-ups wanted halted could be grabbed out of the hopper, as it were, just before they went into the payment machine which goes by the acronym PAM. In the documents this is called the “landing zone.” A portal was created to computers at the State Department where where USAID payments could be sent to be analyzed and possibly rejected (see Robinson, paragraph 9 and 10). What actually happened was a little different. The State Department eventually decided to intercept USAID payments before they even arrived at the payment system. But then the criteria for payment block was expandede. Four HHS were pulled for review before finally being approved and one for the Millenium Challenge Corporation was rejected altogether. Later they did some more work to automate this process that would grab payment orders just before they went into the payment machine – “Elez assisted in automating the manual review of the payment files.” (see Robinson, paragraph 11).
But the report also says that Elez himself was never approved for any more than read access to any of these systems – basically what the administration has been claiming publicly all along. They say he was given a Treasury Department laptop with a copy of the code but that it was totally sandboxed off from anything live. That puts a different gloss on what I (and Wired just before me) reported back on Feb. 4. Except there’s an exception. According to this report, Elez was “mistakenly” given full “write” access for a while (see Gioeli, paragraph 20). The documents say they’re still investigating why this happened. They’re also still investigating whether he knew he had these privileges and what if anything he did with them. But according to the documents, their preliminary investigation indicates he never knew he had those abilities and never used them. So it’s hard to know what to make of that part of the story.
But I want to point out something about the documents, sort of forest for the trees. Because this may be a distinction without a real difference. The documents explain what I describe above as this new pathway for rejecting payments further upstream in the payment flow. They refer to this being done by the DOGE team working in collaboration with the existing staff. The declarations refer to this collaboration as the “engagement plan” and another declaration from Joseph Gioeli III explains that the scope of this work “required access to Fiscal Service source code, applications, and databases across all these Fiscal Service payment and accounting systems and their hosting environments.” (see Gioeli, paragraph 11).
According to the documents there were only two members of the DOGE Team – Marko Elez and Tom Krause. And those same documents suggest that only Elez was working directly with the BFS techs. So if you read the documents closely they leave open the possibility that rather than Elez making changes to the system directly with his own keystrokes that he was in essence directing BFS civil servants to do so. So again, by that interpretation, it’s sort of a distinction without a difference.
Gioeli’s declaration also makes clear, albeit in a perhaps understated way, that the civil servant techs at BFS were highly concerned about a host of risks tied to doing this work and that while they did everything they could to mitigate those risks there was only so much they could do. What it all comes down to is that we got some significant factual clarifications from these declarations but, as per the cliche, they raised at least as many questions as they answered. And the biggest news to me is that they not only made changes to the system but in fact did hold and in one case actually rejected a payment.
You can read the relevant court filings made by the government on Feb. 11, 2025, including the four declarations and the memorandum of law.
[Ed.Note – 2.17.25: This post has been revised to reflect that four delayed and reviewed payments were from the Department of Health and Human Services rather than USAID, as originally reported.]
