Treasury Elevates Musk Ally to Lead Government Payment System

The elevation of Tom Krause to a more powerful role at Treasury will likely inflame an ongoing backlash over DOGE.

People protest during a rally against Elon Musk outside the Treasury Department in Washington, Feb. 4, 2025. 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has downplayed the extent of DOGE’s access to the payment system. | Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo

By Michael Stratford

02/07/2025 04:34 PM EST

The Trump administration has installed an associate of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency group to oversee the Treasury Department’s massive financial operations, including running the federal payments system and managing the cash and debt that finances the government.

Tom Krause, the CEO of Cloud Software Group who has been leading DOGE’s review of federal payments, is now performing the duties of Treasury’s fiscal assistant secretary, according to the agency’s website.

Krause is taking on the responsibilities that until last week were held by David Lebryk, the longtime fiscal assistant secretary who resigned after a dispute with Trump administration officials over Krause’s access to the payments systems and requests to halt foreign aid payments.

Trump administration officials previously said they hired Krause as a DOGE consultant who is serving as a special government employee of the Treasury Department.

It was not immediately clear when Krause began performing the duties of the fiscal secretary at Treasury, though a different career official was listed on the website earlier this week following Lebryk’s departure.

A Treasury spokesperson did not immediately have more details on the personnel change. The news was first reported by The Washington Post earlier Friday.

The elevation of Krause to a more powerful role at Treasury will likely inflame an ongoing backlash over the DOGE team’s access to the sensitive payments system, which controls the flow of trillions of dollars of Social Security payments, Medicare benefits, tax refunds and other government disbursements.

A federal judge has temporarily ordered Treasury to restrict access to the payment system as part of a lawsuit by federal employee unions that accuse the administration of violating privacy and taxpayer confidentiality laws. New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, is planning to file a similar lawsuit. And Democrats in Congress have demanded investigations into DOGE’s work on the payment system.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) on Friday led a letter requesting that Treasury’s inspectors general investigate the Trump administration’s “conflicting accounts” about the extent of DOGE’s access to the payments system and whether it’s legal.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has downplayed the extent of Krause and DOGE’s access to the payment system and on Thursday defended their work as a serious and overdue examination of how Treasury disburses federal dollars.

“These are highly trained professionals,” Bessent said in an interview with Bloomberg. “This is not some roving band going around doing things. This is methodical and it is going to yield big savings.”

Bessent said in the interview that the DOGE team at his agency consisted of “two Treasury employees,” one of whom he said he personally vetted.

On Thursday, Marko Elez, an engineer who reported to Krause, resigned from his role as a DOGE Treasury staffer after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about racist posts he made on social media.

“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” Elez’s account posted, according to the Journal. The newspaper also reported that Elez’s X account also posted: “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and “Normalize Indian hate.”

But, on Friday, Vice President JD Vance called for the Trump administration to take a different approach to Elez, writing on X that he should be reinstated.

“I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” Vance said. “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back.

At a news conference, Trump said he didn’t know about the particulars of the matter but supported Vance’s position. “I’m with the vice president,” Trump said.

“He will be brought back,” Musk said in a post on X. “To err is human, to forgive divine.”

The fiscal assistant secretary is the highest-ranking nonpolitical position at the Treasury Department and oversees the Bureau of the Fiscal Service. Among other things, the fiscal assistant secretary is responsible for forecasting when the government may run out of cash and managing the “extraordinary” steps that Treasury is currently taking to avoid a catastrophic default on the nation’s financial obligations.