Nearly one-third of Treasury payments a year lack proper identification codes, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent testified to Congress
Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uncovered $4.7 trillion in untraceable Treasury Department payments.
Prior to the discovery, Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) identification codes were optional for $4.7 trillion in Treasury Department payments, so they were often left blank and were untraceable. The field is now required to increase “insight into where the money is actually going,” the Treasury Department and DOGE announced in February.
“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,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government earlier this month.
Fox News Digital asked Republican senators on Capitol Hill to respond to the approximately 500,000 in untraceable payments made by the Treasury Department each year.
“I’m not surprised at all, unfortunately,” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, said before 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, called for an investigation into where those payments actually went.
“There’s so much waste. There’s so much fraud, There’s so much abuse in our government,” Schmitt told Fox News Digital. “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.”
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have worked to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). (Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC)
After DOGE and the Treasury Department uncovered $4.7 trillion in untraceable funds, Marshall and Sen. Rick Scott of Florida introduced a bill in March requiring the Treasury Department to track all payments.
The Locating Every Disbursement in Government Expenditure Records (LEDGER) Act seeks to increase transparency in how the Treasury Department spends taxpayer money.
“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,” Scott said.
Elon Musk shows off his t-shirt reading “Tech Support” while speaking at the first cabinet meeting hosted by President Donald Trump, at the White House in Washington, D.C., Feb. 26, 2025. (REUTERS/Brian Snyder)
The Congressional Budget projects that interest payments on America’s national debt will total $952 billion in fiscal year 2025. That’s $102 billion more than the United States’ defense budget at $850 billion.
“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,” said Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska.
“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.”
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