Democratic lawmakers and government watchdog groups are pledging to fight back against Elon Musk’s takeover of the federal government’s payment system, which they say may be the biggest privacy and security breach in American history.

“If we were watching this happen in Venezuela or Malawi and we saw a billionaire seize the money supply and the checkbook of the government, we would call it a coup,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative economic policy group and a former Senate senior economic policy advisor.
Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, is an unpaid advisor to President Donald Trump. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has been tasked with finding ways to cut spending and regulations.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., in an exclusive interview with USA TODAY, said that Musk sent young DOGE computer programmers into the Treasury Department’s headquarters, where they allegedly strong-armed civil service workers to gain full access to the system that cuts checks for all congressionally authorized government payments.
Reports emerged over the weekend that Musk’s DOGE operatives were at Treasury, going through the payment systems and that they had effectively ousted the top civil servant at the Treasury Department, David Lebryk, after he refused to grant access to Musk’s emissaries.

And they ultimately pressured Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to “turn the keys over” to them, said Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.
The payment system, traditionally managed by career civil servants and non-political staff, handles trillions of dollars annually, including Social Security and Medicare benefits and tax credits.

Wyden said his staff found out about the events on Friday and independently confirmed them through whistleblowers and internal sources.

By Monday, the Senate staffers had concluded that the DOGE workers spent the weekend accessing the Treasury Department’s massive federal payment system, Wyden said, including “the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans, bank accounts and tax data, Social Security numbers and home addresses.”
“We got on it, and what is clear now is that unqualified and unaccountable people have seized control of the flow of taxpayer funds and a trove of very sensitive data, and they are seizing the tools they need for a coup,” Wyden said.
‘Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour,’ Musk says

Musk appeared to condone the activities of DOGE personnel working at Treasury in a Feb. 2 post on X, the social media platform he owns.

“Career Treasury officials are breaking the law every hour of every day by approving payments that are fraudulent or do not match the funding laws passed by Congress,” Musk posted. “This needs to stop NOW!”
Musk later posted information about some of the DOGE personnel at Treasury, and others going through similar databases at the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM. He said they have degrees from Stanford, UC Berkeley, & MIT and work experience at Google and companies he owns like Tesla and SpaceX.

“Time to confess: Media reports saying that @DOGE has some of world’s best software engineers are in fact true,” Musk wrote in a Monday afternoon @X post.
Musk also defended his team’s actions at Treasury by saying, “The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups. They literally never denied a payment in their entire career. Not even once.”

A Democratic staff official on the Senate Finance Committee told USA TODAY on Monday that Musk’s comment suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of how the process works. The system, he said on the condition of anonymity, is basically the U.S. government’s checkbook for payments already approved by Congress. To find waste, fraud and abuse, the staffer said, Musk would need to go to the agencies that are actually spending the money.