Treasury Secretary Bessent denies DOGE team is ‘tinkering’ with the payment system, says DOGE has ‘read-only’ access

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent criticized “misinformation” about allegedly unauthorized access to the payment system by government accountability workers.

Critics excoriated the Trump administration after claims surfaced that workers with the Department of Government Accountability were given access to view and edit payment information for millions of Americans.

‘They have no ability to change the system. I have no ability to grant that change.’

Bessent made the comments in an interview with Bloomberg Television where he also said that the Treasury doesn’t even have the access to the system they were criticized over.

“Thank you for asking me about that because there’s a lot of misinformation out there,” said Bessent.

“First of all, when you say the DOGE team, these are Treasury employees. Two Treasury employees. One of whom I personally interviewed in his final round,” he added.

“There is no tinkering with the system. They are on read-only. They are looking. They can make no changes. It is an operational program to suggest improvements.”

He went on to say that they make 1.3 billion payments per year at the Treasury. When asked if the team ever had access to change the entries, Bessent said, “Absolutely not.”

Bessent also said that the Federal Reserve has the ability to change the data, not the Treasury.

“We don’t even run the system,” he said. “They have no ability to change the system. I have no ability to grant that change.”

The Treasury was sued by a coalition of unions that claimed the access to payment systems constituted a “systematic, continuous, and ongoing violation of federal laws that protect the privacy of personal information contained in federal records.”

On Thursday, a federal judge sided with the unions and ordered Bessent to only allow “read-only” access to the systems.

In his interview with Bloomberg, Bessent went on to praise the DOGE effort.

“I think there are gigantic cost savings for the American people here,” he said. “I believe that this DOGE program, in my adult life, is one of the most important audits of government, or changes to government structure, that we have seen.”

Video of portions of the Bessent interview can be viewed on Bloomberg’s YouTube channel.

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