January 31, 2025 – Top Treasury official resigns; his manager, an Obama insider and BlackRock advisor, resigns; DOGE team discovers Treasury is funding terrorist groups

In Email/Dossier/Govt Corruption Investigations, Featured Timeline Entries by Katie Weddington

David Lebryk’s was placed on administrative leave after resisting requests from Mr. Musk’s team. (Credit…Bill O’Leary/Washington Post/Getty Images)

The Trump administration pushed out a top Treasury Department official this week after he refused to give Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team access to the government’s vast payment system, part of a bid by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to choke off federal funding.

David Lebryk, a career civil servant who oversaw the more than one billion payments that the federal government makes every year, was placed on administrative leave this week after resisting requests from Mr. Musk’s lieutenants, according to people familiar with the circumstances, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal dynamics.

On Friday, Mr. Lebryk — who had briefly served as acting Treasury secretary until the confirmation of Scott Bessent this week — told colleagues that he would retire after more than 35 years of working for the government.

(…) Mr. Musk, a billionaire, has dispatched aides across the bureaucracy to try to radically reduce spending. He has told Trump administration officials that he aims to take control of the Treasury computers used to complete payments in order to identify fraud and abuse, according to three people familiar with his remarks.

The Treasury Department executes payments on behalf of agencies across the government, disbursing $5.4 trillion, or 88 percent of all federal payments, in the last fiscal year. The system is run out of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, a little-known but critical office that is responsible for getting money to Social Security recipients, government employees, contractors and others. (The New York Times, 1/31/2025)