Treasury Department

There’s mounting evidence that Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary is not telling the truth about DOGE’s infiltration of the federal payments system.

Unelected billionaire Elon Musk and his DOGE demolition crew have infiltrated the Treasury Department’s payments system. We’re tracking this crisis as it unfolds.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was asked about the Elon Musk-led DOGE team’s meddling in the Treasury Department’s payments system. His answers raise additional questions.

Scott Bessent’s appointment to CFPB acting director will undermine the agency’s mission.

Bessent’s decision to hand the unelected Musk and his covert, unaccountable DOGE wrecking crew the keys to the federal money spigot is a blatant attack on democracy that will harm working people.

Concessions from the 2023 debt ceiling fight continue to haunt Democrats, and tax cheats could enjoy hundreds of billions in savings.

Political reporters must explain the consequences likely to ensue if Steven Mnuchin, Joseph Otting, or their pro-Wall Street doppelgangers return for a second Trump administration.

Campaign coverage should feature more questions about who would again feature in a second Trump Administration.

In response to Thursday’s reporting from E&E News on the Energy Department pushing the Treasury Department to align its clean hydrogen tax credit guidance with industrial polluters’ wishlist, the Revolving Door Project released the following statement: 

The Revolving Door Project released a new Industry Agenda report today examining the executive branch influence agenda of the rapidly growing “clean” hydrogen industry, which is poised to receive tens of billions of dollars under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. 

Despite this, Janet Yellen’s Treasury Department has yet to formalize the regulations that would usher in this new reporting regime. The initial expectation was to have Treasury provide the new guidance by the end of 2022, allowing reporting changes to begin with transactions completed in 2023. However, despite approval of the proposed regulations by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in February (the usual stumbling block in this sort of proceeding), the department has yet to publish the regulations.

Earlier this month, Politico reported that after Biden secured his debt ceiling deal—a deal whose poison pills we’ll still be unpacking for some time to come—he went quiet on exploring options to permanently get rid of the debt ceiling.

This goes against what the president promised agitated members of his own party who urged him to take any manner of executive branch routes to resolve the crisis without capitulating to Republican demands: that it was his “hope and intention” to “find a rationale to take it to the courts to see whether or not the 14th Amendment is, in fact, something that would be able to stop it.” And it sets us up for another protracted, exhausting, damaging tête-à-tête at the edge of a fiscal cliff in just eighteen months.

Eh, not really.