Elon Musk on Tuesday praised a Treasury Department report detailing hundreds of millions of dollars in “improper payment requests” as a “big deal.”
In a repost on X from the Department of Government Efficiency, it was stated that when the Treasury Department went “live with its first automated payment verification system,” it reported identifying and rejecting $334 million in payment requests because of “missing budget codes, invalid budget codes (i.e., the payment was not linked to the budget), [and] budget codes with no authorization (i.e., the budget had already been fully spent).”
DOGE added that the Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) is an identification code that links a payment to a budget line item.
“In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible,” DOGE posted. “As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going. Thanks to @USTreasury for the great work.”
His comments come after DOGE reported uncovering nearly $1 billion in savings through cutting federal contracts and grants.
It posted last week that federal agencies ended 269 “wasteful contracts” with a total value of $845 million and savings of $255 million.
These include a $50,000 Interior Department consulting contract set up to “provide facilitation and collaborative problem-solving services.”
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