Lawfare Archive: DOGE’s Attack on the Treasury Department

From February 21, 2025: Before January, most Americans had probably never heard of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS), a Treasury Department agency that distributes payments from the federal government. But over the last month, this corner of government has appeared again and again in the headlines, as aides working with Elon Musk’s quasi-governmental DOGE initiative successfully gained access to BFS’s payment systems. After a flurry of litigation, a temporary restraining order now bars these aides from accessing data—but the crisis is not over. It’s still not clear precisely what happened within BFS or what access political actors within the administration might gain in the future, and DOGE continues to access similarly sensitive systems in other agencies, such as the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service.

To understand what’s happening, Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic spoke with Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Jacob Leibenluft, who served in the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget under the Biden administration. Why is it so alarming to have political appointees accessing BFS systems? What does this tell us about the administration’s political goals? And what manner of crises could result from this kind of meddling?

To receive ad-free podcasts, become a Lawfare Material Supporter at www.patreon.com/lawfare. You can also support Lawfare by making a one-time donation at https://givebutter.com/lawfare-institute.

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(3072)

Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, September 1

In a conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Molly Roberts and Roger Parloff to discuss the Supreme Court granting a stay of the district court's ...

2 Sep 43min

Lawfare Daily: How Terrorist Groups are Using Artificial Intelligence

Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman sits down with Tricia Bacon, professor at American University, and Antonia Juelich, International Security Lead at the Cambridge Programme on AI Science & Po...

1 Sep 41min

Lawfare Daily: The Trials of the Trump Administration, August 28

In a conversation on YouTube, Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Senior Editors Anna Bower, Molly Roberts, Kate Klonick, and Eric Columbus to discuss a judge finding the Pentagon’s ...

31 Aug 1h 37min

Lawfare Archive: ‘Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare,’ with Edward Fishman

From March 5, 2025: For today's episode, Lawfare general counsel and senior editor Scott R. Anderson sat down with Edward Fishman, a senior research scholar at the Center for Global Energy Policy with...

30 Aug 1h 8min

Lawfare Archive: The Trucker Convoys and Domestic Unrest in Canada

From February 11, 2022: Over the past few weeks, Canada has been living through its own insurrectionary moment, as a series of trucker convoys have used tractor trailer trucks to occupy much of downto...

29 Aug 1h 3min

Lawfare Daily: Israel's Most Consequential Election, with Natan Sachs

Lawfare Foreign Policy Editor Daniel Byman sits down with Natan Sachs, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, to discuss who is likely to win the October 27 Israeli elections and what the conse...

28 Aug 47min

Rational Security: The “All Takin’ and No Givin’” Edition

This week, Scott sat down with his Lawfare colleagues Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes, Public Service Fellow Julia Curlee, and Contributing Editor Alex Zerden to talk through the week’s big news in na...

27 Aug 1h 15min

Scaling Laws: Is Meta's Oversight Board a Model for AI Governance?

Kenji Yoshino, Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law and a member of Meta’s Oversight Board, joins Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation...

27 Aug 47min