Can I call you back? Busy helping Elon put “buy” and “share” buttons on all the individual financial records in the U.S. Treasury payment system. Just a minor refactor.
– joke by Paul Lyons intended for IT professionals and marketing people
While we read about the Elon coup d’état of 2025 the news reports lack significant information. The system that Elon and his young henchmen are accessing is called “Secure Payment System, or SPS.” They evidently have “read-only” access. Some reports say “read-only” access to the code base. This is very reassuring. I like my Social Security number just the was it is, thank you very much! In another report it states that Elon is running the data through AI Tools to find waste and fraudulent payments. This from a guy who works for a billionaire who somehow gets away with never paying taxes. Elon is part of that billionaire club that does not pay taxes as well. It is so virtuous for him to be looking out for our money!
When I first read that Elon is looking into efficiencies in the federal payment systems I thought that his goal was to somehow modernize the system. Refactor the code base. Get rid of crappy patches. Upgrade the documentation. Review the database design. Traditional systems like banking, healthcare, transportation are notorious for having systems build upon very old systems. They often were created in long defunct languages and architectures. People often get things done via command line. I have worked with such legacy many times proprietary systems. They are often obtuse, clunky and were built for a much early time. Even things ten years old seem antiquated.
One could optimistically surmise that Elon, in his benevolence wanted to upgrade the public system in a content agnostic way out of some sort of altruism. (I always wondered why the San Francisco Public School System never got any love from the tech sector for their systems.) But nothing is further from the truth. The Treasury Department with this Secure Payment System, up until now, has always paid out everything on time. Every invoice, Every tax return. Every bill on time. That is incredible.
What Elon is doing is not content agnostic. He thinks he can shape public policy via cutting payments to things he does not like. He thinks he can undo public policy. He obviously has never read The Constitution and how the U.S. system of government works. What Elon Musk is doing is illegal. He is not an elected official.
Update: 2/7/2025
I actually got a lot of this story correct. See https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/02/elon-musk-doge-security/681600/. The added feature is that the systems are so complex that they are like nested Russian dolls. ” It’s less a database than it is a Russian nesting doll of databases, the experts said.”