(Substack)—The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, revealed earlier this year that $4.7 trillion in Treasury Department payments were untraceable.
Previously, Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) codes were not mandatory for these payments, leading to many blank entries and untraceable funds. In February, the Treasury Department and DOGE announced that TAS codes are now required to provide “insight into where the money is actually going.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government this month, “Of the 1.5 billion payments that we send out every year, they are required to have a TAS, a Treasury Account Symbol. We discovered that more than one third of those payments did not have a TAS number.”
Fox News Digital sought reactions from Republican senators regarding the roughly 500,000 untraceable annual payments by the Treasury Department.
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, remarked, “I’m not surprised at all, unfortunately,” adding, “They were leaving complete fields undone when they were filling out their financials, so this is a common theme. I’m not surprised.”
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Missouri, urged for a probe into the destination of these payments, stating, “There’s so much waste. There’s so much fraud, There’s so much abuse in our government. I’m glad there was a laser-like focus on it. We ought to make many of those reforms permanent, but there probably ought to be some investigations here about where this money actually went. I mean this is taxpayer money. People work hard.”
Following the discovery, Sens. Roger Marshall and Rick Scott, R-Florida, proposed the Locating Every Disbursement in Government Expenditure Records (LEDGER) Act in March to mandate tracking of all Treasury payments, aiming to enhance transparency in spending taxpayer funds.
Sen. Rick Scott expressed frustration, saying, “When you hear about this story that they didn’t know where the money was going, it makes you mad because this is somebody’s money, this is taxpayers’ money when we have almost $37 trillion in debt, so this makes no sense at all.”
The Congressional Budget estimates that interest payments on the national debt will reach $952 billion in fiscal year 2025, surpassing the $850 billion defense budget by $102 billion.
Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, highlighted, “We paid out more last year on our debt, $36 trillion in debt, with $950 billion in interest going to bondholders all over the world, including in China. That $950 billion didn’t go to build a bridge or an F-35. We paid more on the interest on debt than we did to fund our military.”
He added, “That is an inflection point that when most countries hit, you look at history, that’s when great powers start to decline. So we have to get those savings.”
