DOGE due diligence at treasury

"adventures in hide the ball" and other fun lawfare

longtime gatopal™ jeffrey tucker had a terrifying and illuminating piece in the epoch times today:

apparently, the rage and indignation emanating from all manner of statists, deep and shallow alike, about DOGE penetrating the holy sanctum of “the treasury payables” so that they could see, in its entirety, where the money actually goes may (apart from all the corruption it’s exposing like blacklight on a hotel bedspread) have quite a lot to do with a truly wild fact that was not known to me:

did you know that since 1946 no president nor any of his appointed staff of secretaries up to and including the treasury secretary has had access to the US government’s payment system?

none. nada. zilch. it’s one big opaque black box to which the executive branches executives have been barred.

this is past shocking. this is surreal.

it’s also astonishingly explanatory and gives amazing insight into “how we got to here.”

payables are the record. when you due diligence a company, once you decide you might be interested, this is where you start. you look at everyhting that goes out and you match it to bank statements. it’s DD 101. any first year investment banker, auditor, or accountant knows this. it’s so obvious that the idea that someone might not do it at trillion dollar scale with a pentagon whose $2000 hammers cannot hammer out any semblance of a passing audit grade beggars belief and the fact that it has not been done by the US government for 79 years threatens to make beggars of us all.

no fewer than 5 former swamp donkey secretaries of treasury are up in arms in a pravda on the hudson opinion piece that essentially amounts to railing about “how dare someone come in and do the job that we ourselves should have done!?!”

it’s surreal to see this put in such unapologetic terms:

“The nation’s payment system has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants.”

imagine thinking that this was a hill to die on.

worse, imagine believing that this cloister of incorruptible payables monks were, in fact, non-partisan, particularly to the “uniparty” permanent state whose influence is so rapidly being revealed by a practice that would not even raise an eyebrow as “basic audit to buy a family feed store” much less anything forensic or complex.

methinks the secretaries doth protest too much.

this is what has them so big mad:

“In recent days, that norm has been upended, and the roles of these nonpartisan officials have been compromised by political actors from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. One has been appointed fiscal assistant secretary—a post that for the prior eight decades had been reserved exclusively for civil servants to ensure impartiality and public confidence in the handling and payment of federal funds.”

this is so full of doublespeak and false equivalence that it’s difficult to know where to start, but i suppose that “lawsuit over norm is not much of a legal case” is as good as any. “we have long done it this way” says nothing about whether that was was good, right, desirable, or even legal and similarly says nothing about doing it another way. they are trying to pass off “we have controlled this for 4 generations” as “this is how it should be.” but clearly it isn’t.

the dirt, fraud, self-dealing, influence operations, and circular trails of dirty money that have emerged around USAID alone would be enough to demand a forensic audit of this whole ecosystem in any sort of sane private setting or transaction.

add in FEMA sending billions to house tren de aragua gangsters (who were also apparently tipped off by FBI about impending ICE raids) and who knows what else, and sorry, but this idea that we have good people watching the payment money flowing out and that letting some sunshine in on the doings at the treasury is somehow overturning a wonderful and longstanding applecart is just bunk.

this whole edifice is thieves who know they are thieves and the corruption is bone deep.

you can ask them yourself and apparently they’ll tell you unreservedly.

man i just cannot believe how frequently this “beautiful stranger flirting” pitch works. how can they not see this coming? these people are remarkably unsophisticated and stupid. why not? there was no evolutionary pressure on this system.

you could lie, cheat, steal, and self-deal and the treasury only ever said yes. their whole job was to say yes and nothing but yes. no checks, no balances, no accountability, no transparency.

no one ever got even questioned, much less caught.

of course they dwindled down to being epsilon minus semi-morons.

even a conspiracy kittycat like me is shocked that treasury secretaries would stand up in public to defend “the way we prevent transparency at treasury” while things like this are coming to light. seriously? we have terrorists on autopay and no one is allowed to see because that would be “partisan?”

this certainly raises some pointy questions about what’s passing for bi-partisan cooperation around here these days.

this is not ignorance, it’s complicity. it’s desperation to stop the bleeding and keep the dark doings in darkness. they know full well what’s in this payments list will be so far past the pale as to move the overton window forever.

this is way past “bad.” you cannot even see “bad” from how far gone this is.

they try to make a claim that they are trying to “save the payments system and faith in the US” but this is self serving subterfuge.

make no mistake:

this is the state saying that democracy dies in sunlight.

we the people may not observe how our tax dollars are spent lest we rise in rage over such mendacious mismanagement.

not much of a basis for a republic, is it?

jeffrey opines:

What happened here with the Trump administration and DOGE is that it was beginning the process of opening the books, starting with data access about payments coming and going, a reorganization of the databases, and a modernization including possibly a public listing on a blockchain. This was the essential precondition for bringing in the auditors to give a full accounting of what precisely is going on.

Sure enough, a federal judge interfered, essentially siding with the “very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants” over the people elected to oversee the executive branch. It seems incredible but that is what has happened. We now await appeals and judgments from higher courts to decide whether and to what extent elected officials can have access to the beating heart of the government’s finances.

the donkeys want this in the courts where they can jurisdiction shop and find crazy and compromised zealots to make wild rulings and slow the tempo down to months and years.

you can see it coming.

and the courts have, of a sudden, begun to display the characteristics of certain marsupials renowned for the uneven-handedness of their jurisprudence.

apparently, district judges are now doctors and webmasters both.

quite an astonishing turn of affairs.

why, it’s almost as if this is partisan lawfare aimed at propping up the very crookedness that is under assessment and that DOGE has set its sights upon removing.

oh, wait, it’s exactly like that…

and on this one, i’m with muskrat:

betcha dollars to kitty chow that this “hope for children” NGO (one of 1.5 million funded in the US alone by our esteemed federales and their opacity driven payables system) was not saving much in the way of children.

we need to get SCOTUS in here in a hurry.

other judges have ruled the feds must put “pronouns back in signatures on emails” and 20 other absurdities that all seem to have one thing in common with the rulings about “putting an appointed person in an appointed position at treasury to see what’s spent”: they all lack legal basis.

we need some sort of sweeping judicial chevron ruling here. a test case and clear precedent that judges do not run the executive branch.

this feels like a rope a dope. pretty soon the swamp donkey lawfare squad is going to be standing in front of clarence thomas trying to tell him that district judge nobody from nowhere should be able to overrule the president on appointments of low level executive employees and the content of public health websites.

and won’t that be fun?

but that’s only half the fight.

meanwhile, DOGE needs to keep the pressure high and the attack moving on every front. move fast. break things. overwhelm.

this may be the first time in history that auditing the people who produce the employment reports has a material effect on future employment reports...

and this is genius.

audit all the congress critters and apparatchiks. let’s see how they all got so rich.

this both serves an excellent purpose and also keeps them busy and the corrupt ones scared.

this is a field upon which we need to fight.

make sure you take a couple hops and see who funded the groups who paid "speaking fees" and "book deals" (or bought art). this is going to flow right to corporate patrons, foreign actors, and USAID, likely through NGO's.

work from crook down and treasury up and find the money lanes.

surround and turn the guilty and move upstream and down until you have herded the fish.

keep coming from every side.

hell, release the epstein list while you’re at it.

chaos is a ladder.

we are over the target and the way you know that is how wild these people are going in fear and rage and how insane and unjustifiable their responses have grown. they are overbold, over-exposed, and desperate.

and this is precisely where they must be drawn, too far out onto a field where they cannot fight.

the rugpull will be one for the ages.

for does not the master tell us: