The Department of Government Efficiency announced on Monday that it had uncovered a significant tracking gap in the Department of Treasury’s funding.
The DOGE explained in a post on X that the Treasury Department uses an “identification code” to link its payments to budget line items. However, it discovered that this tracking code was optional for approximately $4.7 trillion in expenses and was often left blank, rendering the funds nearly impossible to trace.
‘Major improvement in Treasury payment integrity.’
“The Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) is an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item (standard financial process),” the DOGE wrote. “In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible. As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going.”
According to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, TAS described “any one of the account identification codes assigned by Treasury.” The federal government’s financial transactions are classified by TAS for reporting to the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget.
Elon Musk responded to the DOGE’s post, calling the directive to mandate the TAS field a “major improvement in Treasury payment integrity.”
He noted that the change resulted from a combined effort among the DOGE, the Treasury Department, and the Federal Reserve.
The Trump administration clarified on Monday that Musk is not officially an employee of the DOGE and “has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.”
In a court filing, Office of Administration Director Joshua Fisher stated that Musk serves as “a Senior Adviser” to President Donald Trump and holds “no greater authority than other senior White House advisers.”
According to the DOGE’s website, within the first month of Trump’s second term, the newly formed agency has already saved American taxpayers $55 billion.
These savings stem from “a combination of fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings.”
So far, the DOGE lists the United States Agency for International Development as the number one agency for “total contract savings,” followed by the Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Agriculture.
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