Treasury tried to freeze payments for foreign assistance, E emails show

In the days after President Trump joined when Elon Musk’s team began pushing for access to the Treasury’s department’s payment system, officials repeatedly said their goal was to do a general review of the system. They said they would observe but not prevent money from going out the door.

But e-mails reviewed by the New York Times show that the Treasury’s Chief of Staff originally pressed on Tom Krause, a software affiliated with Mr. Musk’s so -called Department of Government Efficiency, to receive access to the closely held payment system so that the Treasury could freeze the US Agency for International Development Payments.

In a January 24 -e -e -mail to a small group of Ministry of Finance’s officials, the chief of staff, Dan Katz, wrote that Mr. Krause and his team needed access to the system so they could put USAD payments and comply with Mr. Trump’s January 20th Executive order to stop foreign aid.

“To the extent allowed by law, we would like to implement the break as soon as possible to ensure that we perform our role to comply with EO,” Mr. Katz.

The e emails seen by Times are undercut the Treasury’s explanation of why Mr. Krause and his team gained access to the payment system last week. This system pays more than $ 5 trillion in funding on behalf of large parts of the federal government.

The department, now led by Secretary Scott Bessent, has said that Mr. Krause, a state employee of the Ministry of Finance, and his team performs an “operational efficiency assessment” that does not involve blocking agency payments.

The possibility that systems at the State Treasury’s slightly known agency for the fiscal service used to stop congress, which is authorized expenses, have set alarm among Democrats who have called for investigations and led protests in the Treasury.

David Lebrik, formerly the top career -official at the Treasury, rejected the request to give access and pause the assistance payments.

“I don’t think we have the legal authority to stop an authorized payment certified by an agency,” he wrote to the group on January 24. Mr. Leebrik, who had been a federal employee for more than 35 years, was pushed out of his job days later to refuse to give Mr. Krause access to the system. Late on January 31, a Friday, Authorized Mr. Bessent entry for a team led by Mr. Krause after Mr. Leebrik’s departure.

On January 25, Mr. Krause on Mr. LEACK and said the department should also weigh the legal consequences of the Ministry of Finance being paid in violation of the executive order.

“I think this also deserves serious consideration. I think we can all feel more comfortable, that at least we have payment to review the underlying payment requests from the help of the United States now, so we can have time to consult the state, ”Mr. Krause and referred to the Ministry of State.

The Trump administration has said that access to Mr. Krause and his team are limited. On Tuesday, the Ministry of Finance sent a letter to Congress that “currently” Mr. Krause and his team “will have read -only access.” After the unions in the public sector sued the question, a lawyer for the Ministry of Justice said in court on Wednesday that only Mr. Krause and Marko Elez, both Ministry of Finance, had accessed information in the system that they have not shared outside the Treasury.

Mr. Elez, a former employee of Mr. Musks on both X and XAI, is one of several employees who Doge had planned to install on the Treasury. They also include Mr. Krause, a well -established Silicon Valley Software Executive; Aram Moghaddassi, who has worked for both X and Mr. Musk’s neuralink; and Michael Russo, a Silicon Valley director who has since been appointed Chief Information Officer for Social Security Administration. Mr. Elez did not return requests for comment.

Mr. Bessent defended in an interview Wednesday with the work of Fox Business Network Doge and rejected the proposal that the Treasury’s payment system was compromised.

“Our payment system is not touched,” he said, adding that the Treasury studied how to improve accountability, accuracy and the ability to track where money goes. Mr. Bessent said any stops of payments would be “upstream” within agencies.

Mr. Bessent also described Mr. Musk as the greatest entrepreneur of his generation and said that the setback over his actions happened because he is shaking up the federal bureaucracy.

“They move a lot of people’s cheese here in the capital,” Mr. Bessent. “And when you hear you hear this squawking, some status quo interest is not happy.”

Push for access to the Treasury System came when the Trump administration moved to run USID, the government’s leading agency to provide humanitarian assistance globally. Much of the agency’s workforce will be set on leave this week and contracts have been stopped.

Agencies across the government send files with sensitive data to Bureau of the Fiscal Service and instruct it to send money to the individual Americans, contractors or government governments. Treasury officials carry out a final round of control of the files, including scanning them to see if any recipients are cut off from receiving state funds before the approved payments, which are then made by the Federal Reserve.

Because the process includes sensitive information about Americans, such as bank account numbers, a relatively small number of Finance Ministry is typically involved.

Democrats have questioned whether Mr. Musk’s team actually only has “read -only” access to the payment system. In a post on X, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island -Democrat, wrote that Mr. Musk’s team could “manipulate data, steal data and leave doors. Your privacy away.”

“The trainee who runs Sheldon’s social media account seems very upset,” replied Musk, Adding a crying laughter emoji.

Charlie Savage contributed with reporting.