In February, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uncovered $4.7 trillion in payments made by the US Treasury that are “almost impossible” to trace – as Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) identification codes were optional in the system. This left billions in payments blank and unable to be traced.
“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 told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services earlier this month.
“In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible,” DOGE announced via its X account. Thanks to DOGE, those “optional” days are over. “…this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going,” DOGE added.
Major improvement in Treasury payment integrity going live!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2025
This was a combined effort of @DOGE, @USTreasury and @FederalReserve. Nice work by all. https://t.co/dpLmXRpufT
So while the TAS field is now mandatory, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) has called for an investigation into where the untraceable payments have been going.
“There’s so much waste. There’s so much fraud, There’s so much abuse in our government,” Schmitt told Fox News. “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.”
In March. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) introduced a bill – the LEDGER Act – requiring the Treasury Department to track all payments.
“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,” said Scott.
Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) noted that the United States “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. 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.”
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