Former treasury secretaries warn of risks from Doge’s access of payment system
Five former secretaries of the treasury warn that by accessing the department’s secure payment system, the Donald Trump-sanctioned “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is putting Americans’ privacy at risk.
Writing in the New York Times, the five former secretaries, all of whom served under Democratic presidents, say that foreign actors could benefit from any data breaches that result from Doge’s meddling. Here’s what they wrote:
The nation’s payment system has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants. In recent days, that norm has been upended, and the roles of these nonpartisan officials have been compromised by political actors from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. One has been appointed fiscal assistant secretary — a post that for the prior eight decades had been reserved exclusively for civil servants to ensure impartiality and public confidence in the handling and payment of federal funds.
These political actors have not been subject to the same rigorous ethics rules as civil servants, and one has explicitly retained his role in a private company, creating at best the appearance of financial conflicts of interest. They lack training and experience to handle private, personal data — like Social Security numbers and bank account information. Their power subjects America’s payments system and the highly sensitive data within it to the risk of exposure, potentially to our adversaries. And our critical infrastructure is at risk of failure if the code that underwrites it is not handled with due care. That is why a federal judge this past weekend blocked, at least temporarily, these individuals from the Treasury’s payments system, noting the risk of “irreparable harm.”
They also note that the Trump administration’s efforts to unilaterally prevent the Treasury from disbursing government funds are unconstitutional. “The Trump administration may seek to change the law and alter what spending Congress appropriates, as administrations before it have done as well. And should the law change, it will be the role of the executive branch to execute those changes. But it is not for the Treasury Department or the administration to decide which of our congressionally approved commitments to fulfill and which to cast aside,” the former secretaries write.
Here’s more about Doge’s activities at the Treasury department, and the concerns they have created:
Key events
Democratic congresswoman Val Hoyle says she has quit the congressional caucus supporting Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) over what she describes as its destructive assault on core government functions.
“As the legislative branch, we came here to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars, to make good policy, and, again, work in good faith to find efficiencies, whether that’s investing in IT or, you know, combining agencies or departments, you know, making sure we don’t have too much bureaucracy,” Hoyle told CNN.
“But fundamentally, you can’t do that while government is being blown up from the inside. And let’s be clear, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have a different mission. They say it’s about efficiency and saving taxpayer dollars. It isn’t. It’s about intimidating workers, breaking our government and installing loyalists that are loyal to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and not to the American people or the constitution.”
Only a handful of Democrats joined the Doge caucus, with most saying they were doing so because of their support for reforming aspects of the federal government’s operations.
House Democrats have announced the creation of a “Rapid Response Task Force and Litigation Working Group” to handle their counterattack to the Trump administration’s efforts to transform the federal government.
“We are engaged in a multifaceted struggle to protect and defend everyday Americans from the harm being inflicted by this administration. As outlined last week, it’s an all hands on deck effort simultaneously underway in Congress, the Courts and the Community,” Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote in a letter to colleagues.
Congressman Joe Neguse will chair the effort, along with representatives Rosa DeLauro, Gerry Connolly and Jamie Raskin as co-chairs.
Former treasury secretaries warn of risks from Doge’s access of payment system
Five former secretaries of the treasury warn that by accessing the department’s secure payment system, the Donald Trump-sanctioned “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is putting Americans’ privacy at risk.
Writing in the New York Times, the five former secretaries, all of whom served under Democratic presidents, say that foreign actors could benefit from any data breaches that result from Doge’s meddling. Here’s what they wrote:
The nation’s payment system has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants. In recent days, that norm has been upended, and the roles of these nonpartisan officials have been compromised by political actors from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. One has been appointed fiscal assistant secretary — a post that for the prior eight decades had been reserved exclusively for civil servants to ensure impartiality and public confidence in the handling and payment of federal funds.
These political actors have not been subject to the same rigorous ethics rules as civil servants, and one has explicitly retained his role in a private company, creating at best the appearance of financial conflicts of interest. They lack training and experience to handle private, personal data — like Social Security numbers and bank account information. Their power subjects America’s payments system and the highly sensitive data within it to the risk of exposure, potentially to our adversaries. And our critical infrastructure is at risk of failure if the code that underwrites it is not handled with due care. That is why a federal judge this past weekend blocked, at least temporarily, these individuals from the Treasury’s payments system, noting the risk of “irreparable harm.”
They also note that the Trump administration’s efforts to unilaterally prevent the Treasury from disbursing government funds are unconstitutional. “The Trump administration may seek to change the law and alter what spending Congress appropriates, as administrations before it have done as well. And should the law change, it will be the role of the executive branch to execute those changes. But it is not for the Treasury Department or the administration to decide which of our congressionally approved commitments to fulfill and which to cast aside,” the former secretaries write.
Here’s more about Doge’s activities at the Treasury department, and the concerns they have created:
Third federal judge rules against Trump birthright citizenship ban
A federal judge has found Donald Trump’s attempt to ban birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants unconstitutional, in the third such setback for the order, the Associated Press reports.
The ban was among the executive orders Trump signed on his first day in office, but has been losing in court ever since. Today’s ruling comes from a US district court judge in New Hampshire, and follows similar decisions by judges in Seattle and Maryland. The Trump administration is appealing the Seattle judge’s ruling.
Here’s more on the attempted ban, and its poor showing (thus far) in courtrooms nationwide:
Here’s more on the Trump administration’s legal offensive against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is being headed up by an architect of Project 2025 who is now a top White House official:
Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s newly installed acting head of the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, announced on Saturday he had cut off the agency’s budget and reportedly instructed staff to suspend all activities including the supervision of companies overseen by the agency.
Reuters and NBC News reported that Vought wrote a memo to employees saying he had taken on the role of acting head of the agency, an independent watchdog that was founded in 2011 as an arm of the Federal Reserve to promote fairness in the financial sector.
Vought, who was confirmed on a party line vote last week to lead the office of management and budget, also announced on Saturday evening on Elon Musk’s social media platform X that he was zeroing out the CFPB’s funding for the next fiscal quarter, saying the more than $700m in cash on hand was sufficient.
In his Saturday missive, Vought ordered staff to “cease all supervision and examination activity”, going a step further than a directive issued last week by the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, whom Trump had briefly put in charge after firing Rohit Chopra.
According to an internal email obtained by Reuters, the Washington CFPB headquarters will be closed for the coming week and all employees are to work remotely.
Trump targets consumer protection bureau with order for employees to stop work
Employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) have been ordered to stop all work and not come into the office by Russell Vought, a top White House official and Project 2025 architect who was recently named the bureau’s acting head, Reuters reports.
The email to employees comes as the Trump administration, with the help of Elon Musk, targets agencies across the government that it believes are wasting government funds, or are at odds with its administration’s policies. Here’s more on the offensive against the CFPB, a longtime target of conservatives including Musk, from Reuters:
The move, which followed a weekend decision to shutter the agency’s Washington headquarters, idled a federal agency of nearly 2,000 workers entrusted with enforcing consumer financial laws nationwide.
“Employees should not come into the office. Please do not perform any work tasks,” Acting CFPB Director Russell Vought said in an email to all staff.
The move underscored tumult at the federal regulator since Vought, a longtime budget hawk and architect of the right-wing policy manifesto known as Project 2025, which called for the CFPB’s abolition, took control of the agency on Friday.
The Trump administration’s efforts to neutralize the agency escalated rapidly over the weekend as billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency gained full access to CFPB computer systems and Vought ordered a stop to all oversight of consumer financial companies.
Musk has publicly vowed to destroy the CFPB. The agency could otherwise regulate one of his planned business ventures with payments giant Visa.
Donald Trump’s new battery of tariffs on steel and aluminum imports may cause economic turbulence for industries worldwide, but they’re not yet having much of an effect on US markets.
Wall Street will begin trading in about three minutes, and stock futures point to major indices like the S&P 500 and Dow Jones industrial average making slight gains at the open.
That said, the mood is not so cheery elsewhere. Follow our business blog for the latest as the world reacts to Trump’s trade threat:
Donald Trump will sign more executive orders at 1pm today, but the press is not invited, the White House said.
They also did not reveal what those orders will cover. On Friday, the president ordered the establishment of the White House Faith Office, which is meant to coordinate outreach with houses of worship nationwide.
Ontario’s Super Bowl foray could not be better timed. In an interview with Fox News broadcast before the big game, Donald Trump repeated his desire to see Canada made America’s 51st state.
Here’s the clip:
Viewers of the Super Bowl were treated to advertisements for many things in between play, including something not often exhibited during the annual sports/entertainment ritual: the province of Ontario.
No doubt heeding Donald Trump’s unprecedented attacks on the US-Canada relationship, the province bought itself some Super Bowl ad time to remind Americans of the importance of their good relationship with Canada’s most-populous province. The Toronto Sun has the footage:
Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s director of management and budget, once said he wanted to put federal workers “in trauma”. He’s now in a position to make good on that promise, the Guardian’s Alice Herman reports:
If federal employees are feeling traumatized right now, Russell Vought, the new head of the office of management and budget (OMB), probably has something to do with it.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”
Vought’s words, delivered at an event hosted by his thinktank, Center for Renewing America, were striking. They reflected a view, long-espoused by Vought, that the government should be brought to heel by a sweepingly powerful executive branch.
Now the head of the office of management and budget – the powerful agency in the executive branch that oversees federal agencies and administers the budget – Vought is positioned to help Donald Trump do just that.
Patrick Wintour
Patrick Wintour, the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, reports:
Donald Trump’s proposed “land grabs” mean the US is no longer perceived as “an anchor of stability, but rather a risk to be hedged against”, the organisers of the Munich Security Conference have said in their pre-summit report.
The report, which takes as its theme the shift from a US-led, unipolar post-cold war era towards a multipolar world in which no single ideological outlook dominates, will form the backdrop to this year’s conference.
Since his inauguration, the US president has mooted acquiring land for the US in Greenland and Panama, and suggested Canada could be a 51st US state. The signals from Washington increasingly indicate that the US no longer wants to be the guardian of the liberal international order, but it is far from clear which other countries may be willing and able to provide much-needed global public goods.
The report’s authors suggest a US withdrawal from a global leadership role has implications beyond issues of war and peace: “Without global leadership of the kind provided by the United States for the past several decades, it is hard to imagine the international community providing global public goods like freedom of navigation or tackling even some of the many grave threats confronting humanity.”
Read more from Patrick Wintour here: Trump’s proposed ‘land grabs’ mean US now seen as a risk, says Munich security report
Muted reaction from China after Trump announces another set of tariffs
There has been muted direct reaction from China to Donald Trump’s pre-announcement of another wave of tariffs on steel and aluminium.
The New York Times reports than in its daily briefing, Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, said “Let me stress that protectionism leads nowhere. Trade and tariff wars have no winners.”
The largest sources of US steel imports are Canada, Brazil and Mexico, followed by South Korea and Vietnam, although China dominates global production volumes.
Trump’s pre-announcement came as China’s retaliatory tariffs to his first wave of new charges came into effect. The measures target $14bn worth of products with a 15% tariff on coal and LNG, and 10% on crude oil, farm equipment and some vehicles.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov, who oversees US relations and arms control, said on Monday that the outlook for Russia-US talks on nuclear strategic stability did not look promising. The US has been pressing for three-way talks involving China, but Russia has said it wants Britain and France also included in any new arms control talks.
European Commission says Trump’s tariff proposals are unjustified
A European Commission spokesperson has said that all of Donald Trump proposed tariff measures are unjustified.
“We believe that none of the potential measures outlined by the U.S. administration to date are justified,” Reuters reports the spokesperson said at a daily briefing.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to impose trade tariffs on goods originating from Europe, and some European manufacturers fear the impact on supply chains of tariffs Trump has already imposed on China. On Sunday the US president pre-announced a new round of 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium.
