The New York Times reported that the Musk team was not transparent about its intrusion into the Treasury payment system. It said that it was just “reviewing,” but its real goal was to close down payments for foreign aid. You know, the money that sends American grain to starving people and that supplies medicine and care to desperate people in places like Africa and India.

Forgive the circumlocutions, but I keep looking for polite ways to say they lied. They weren’t there to do a quick Look-see. There were there to stop payments to USAID. They believed that Trump’s executive order overrode the laws. If that were the case, then the U.S. would truly be a dictstorship, where Trump held total power.

For some reason, Trump and Musk hate helping impoverished people, especially if they are not white.

In the days after President Trump took office, as Elon Musk’s team began pressing for access to the Treasury Department’s payments system, officials repeatedly said that their goal was to undertake a general review of the system. They said they would observe, but not stop money from going out the door.

But emails reviewed by The New York Times show that the Treasury’s chief of staff originally pushed for Tom Krause, a software executive affiliated with Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to receive access to the closely held payment system so that the Treasury could freeze U.S. Agency for International Development payments.

In a Jan. 24 email to a small group of Treasury officials, the chief of staff, Dan Katz, wrote that Mr. Krause and his team needed access to the system so they could pause U.S.A.I.D. payments and comply with Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order to halt foreign aid.

“To the extent permitted by law, we would like to implement the pause as soon as possible in order to ensure that we are doing our role to comply with the EO,” Mr. Katz wrote.

The emails viewed by The Times undercut the Treasury’s explanation for why Mr. Krause and his team were given access to the payment system last week. That system disburses more than $5 trillion in funding on behalf of much of the federal government.

The department, now led by Secretary Scott Bessent, has said that Mr. Krause, a Treasury staff member, and his team are conducting an “operational efficiency assessment” that does not involve blocking agency payments.

The possibility of systems at the Treasury’s little-known Bureau of the Fiscal Service being used to stop congressionally authorized spending has stoked alarm among Democrats, who have called for investigations and led protests at the Treasury building.

David Lebryk, formerly the top career official at the Treasury, rebuffed the request to grant access and pause the aid payments.

“I don’t believe we have the legal authority to stop an authorized payment certified by an agency,” he wrote to the group on Jan. 24. Mr. Lebryk, who had been a federal employee for more than 35 years, was pushed out of his job days later for refusing to give Mr. Krause access to the system. Late on Jan. 31, a Friday, Mr. Bessent authorized entry for a team led by Mr. Krause after Mr. Lebryk’s departure.

All of this is illegal. Congress is responsible for funding.