#oped

Their op-ed cites reporting last week by the Times that the Treasury Department’s chief of staff originally pushed for a member of Musk’s DOGE team, Tom Krause, “to receive access to the closely held payment system so that the Treasury could freeze disbursements to the U.S. Agency for International Development.”

Emails seen by the Times “undercut Treasury’s explanation” for why Krause and other members of Musk’s team were granted access to the payments system, which disburses more than $5 trillion in federal funding, the newspaper noted.

The Treasury Department has said Krause and his team “are conducting an ‘operational efficiency assessment’ that does not involve blocking agency payments,” the Times reported.

In their op-ed, the former secretaries said the access “upended” the long-standing practice of payment systems operated by a “very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants.”

“The roles of these nonpartisan officials have been compromised by political actors from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency,” the op-ed said.

“We take the extraordinary step of writing this piece because we are alarmed about the risks of arbitrary and capricious political control of federal payments, which would be unlawful and corrosive to our democracy,” the former secretaries wrote.

Hassett, who leads the National Economic Council, argued strenuously against the op-ed’s premise and claims Monday.

“Can we talk about the Treasury letter first?” Hassett asked the “Squawk Box” hosts. “There’s so much misinformation in it.”

Hassett continued, “Let’s just make it clear the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, is in charge of the Treasury.”

Bessent, said Hassett, “has found that controls for spending of the previous [Biden] administration were unacceptable.”

“They were sending money out without knowing where the money was going. They were sending money out without flagging, you know, ‘what it was for?’ They didn’t check before they sent the money out, whether it was appropriated,” Hassett said. “And as we go in and look, we’re finding lots of things that shouldn’t have been sent.”

Hassett said, “There’s a lot of work to be done to clear that up.”

“This idea that there’s a puppet master telling the Treasury secretary what to do, and therefore all the Treasury secretaries need to be, like, alarmed, that’s just left-wing media, you know, poppycock.”

“Why are we making up fake things about what Elon is doing, because we’re trying to just see where the money’s going,” Hassett said.