Musk staffer takes top role at Treasury Department with control over federal payment system

A DOGE staffer has just been given even more power within the Treasury Department.

Tom Krause, a former executive at Cloud Software Group who Elon Musk’s DOGE installed at Treasury last month, has been named the financial assistant secretary of the Treasury Department, making him the bureaucrat in charge of the government’s largest payment system, per The Washington Post.

Its previous administrator, David Lebryk, left the department after a feud with Musk’s lackeys over access to the sensitive and secure systems. Musk’s team demanded access to the system behind federal paychecks, Social Security and Medicare benefits, tax refunds and federal contracts — access Lebryk, a career civil servant, was unwilling to grant.

With the appointment, Krause will take control of the massive federal payment system at the heart of the dispute amid what some Democrats have called an illegal data breach by Musk and his associates. 

It’s unclear what DOGE intends to do with the Treasury data, though the group has been tied to an effort to freeze payments to USAID and a scheme to feed sensitive Department of Education data into an experimental AI model.

Krause had reportedly been serving as a “special government employee” and was one of just two DOGE workers cleared by a federal judge to continue accessing Treasury payment systems. The other, Marko Elez, resigned on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal uncovered a series of racist posts he made on Musk's website, X.

Just hours before Elez’s firing, Treasury Secretary and Musk ally Scott Bessent defended the two DOGE agents as “highly trained professionals” in an interview with Bloomberg. Bessent clarified that he personally interviewed the two and that they maintained “read-only” access to the payment service.

“This is not some roving band running around doing things,” Bessent said, adding that the cost-cutting operation was “operational,” not “ideological.”