$4.7 Trillion Vanished? Treasury Busted for Years of Untracked Payments [WATCH]

A sweeping review conducted earlier this year by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), spearheaded by Elon Musk, revealed that the U.S. Treasury Department issued $4.7 trillion in payments that were effectively untraceable due to missing data.

The payments, according to DOGE and Treasury officials, lacked mandatory Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) identification codes — a key element used to track federal disbursements.

Until the discovery, inclusion of TAS codes had been optional, a policy which resulted in more than one-third of Treasury disbursements being processed without them.

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“Of the 1.5 billion payments that we send out every year, they are required to have a TAS, a Treasury Account Symbol. We discovered that more than one third of those payments did not have a TAS number,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent testified earlier this month before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government.

.@SecScottBessent: “There was no accountability. That is why the 450 organizations that sit above Treasury, where Treasury acts as the paymaster, are unable to pass an audit. So, we have cracked down on that. Every payment now requires a TAS number.” pic.twitter.com/4kq7wYzNY6

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 6, 2025

In response to the findings, the Treasury Department has moved to make the TAS field a mandatory requirement.

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The change, announced in February, is intended to increase “insight into where the money is actually going,” according to a joint statement from the Treasury and DOGE.

Fox News Digital reached out to Republican senators for reaction to the revelation that roughly 500,000 federal payments each year went untracked.

“I’m not surprised at all, unfortunately,” said Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas.

“They were leaving complete fields undone when they were filling out their financials, so this is a common theme. I’m not surprised.”

Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Missouri, called for a deeper probe.

“There’s so much waste. There’s so much fraud. There’s so much abuse in our government,” Schmitt said.

“I’m glad there was a laser-like focus on it. We ought to make many of those reforms permanent, but there probably ought to be some investigations here about where this money actually went. I mean, this is taxpayer money. People work hard.”

Following the disclosure, Marshall and Sen. Rick Scott, R-Florida, introduced legislation in March titled the Locating Every Disbursement in Government Expenditure Records (LEDGER) Act.

The bill aims to require full tracking of all Treasury Department payments to improve transparency and accountability.

“When you hear about this story that they didn’t know where the money was going, it makes you mad because this is somebody’s money, this is taxpayers’ money when we have almost $37 trillion in debt, so this makes no sense at all,” Scott told reporters.

The issue of financial accountability comes at a time when concerns over the national debt are growing.

According to recent Congressional Budget Office projections, interest payments on the federal debt will reach $952 billion in fiscal year 2025.

That figure is $102 billion more than the United States’ defense budget, which currently stands at $850 billion.

Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, expressed concern about the long-term national security implications of prioritizing debt payments over military readiness.

“We paid out more last year on our debt, $36 trillion in debt, with $950 billion in interest going to bondholders all over the world, including in China. That $950 billion didn’t go to build a bridge or an F-35,” Sullivan said.

“We paid more on the interest on debt than we did to fund our military.”

“That is an inflection point that when most countries hit, you look at history, that’s when great powers start to decline. So we have to get those savings,” he added.

The implementation of mandatory tracking requirements and proposed legislation signal a growing effort among lawmakers to rein in unaccounted federal spending and address systemic financial management failures.

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