I asked Former Bureau of the Fiscal Service Employees to Interpret An Elon Musk Tweet. Here's What they Told me (Crises Notes)

First, it is simply false to say that treasury payments do not have a "payment categorization code". It is notable, by the way, that he uses this completely invented phrase rather than the actual phrase "Treasury Account Symbol" (TAS). Indeed, it's impossible to find another use of this phrase using an internet search engine in any context, let alone the Treasury context. The far more limited "deficiency" pointed out by the Government Accountability Office report Krause referenced is that information about individual government transactions were recorded in multiple different account entries separately by some government agencies and thus individual transactions could not be readily traced through to all the accounting ledgers they effected.

No chud, the government doesn't need to note where it's spending your money and it was definitely working on a system to fix that by 2028 possibly

On to Musk's next claim: the need for "rationales". The idea of putting a "rationale" for each and every individual payment (or payment file) makes little sense in the context of how the system works. Think of this in your own life: do you fill out a little form that provides your "rationale" for purchasing an item every time you swipe your credit card? If you were required to do so, you would react very negatively for the same reason you should react very negatively here: if you had to put a rationale then someone could reject your spending requests on the basis of providing the "wrong" rationale.

Imagine the right wing uproar when the possibility emerged of restricting purchases of meat through such a "rationale for transaction" system. This should be seen as no different. The "Treasury Account Symbol" (TAS) provides the only rationale that should matter which is that congress appropriated the spending. Of course, if you want to abrogate congressional spending then that is obviously not sufficient and, in fact, counterproductive.

No chud, the government doesn't need to note why it's spending your money

Imagine if the government were buying some groceries and the government's credit card was rejected at the checkout, chud, that would be terrible. What if the government imposed fascist restrictions on you, chud, how would you feel?

This all goes back to Musk's tendency to think that there is, can be or should be a "button" that determines all of this and its corrupt, inefficient bureaucrats preventing this from happening. He simply doesn't understand how complex these systems are or why they are the way they are. Take the Treasury Offset Program (TOP) for instance. It is a Bureau of the Fiscal Service system for collecting delinquent federal or state debts. One former Bureau of the Fiscal Service employee explained to me that there are rules that determine:

Actually, chud, the bureaucratic tumour is a good thing and hasn't metastasized enough

To include my own editorial comment for a moment, this is why it's so alarming to see him talk about updating this list "weekly, or even daily". This strongly suggests to me that he is talking about arbitrarily and rapidly expanding the list of people and entities on lists such as the Office of Foreign Assets Controls (OFAC) list without any due process to block them from government payments. As I discussed the Wednesday before last, the apparatuses for capriciously destroying the financial life of disfavored entities and people has been constructed over multiple decades with active Democratic participation and support. Now they are in the hands of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Thus, again, Musk's comments hide a desire for unchecked power over others under a false narrative about governmental "inefficiency".

My sources are also very skeptical that any career Treasury employee told Elon Musk that half of the expenditures that constituted "entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN" were "unequivocal and obvious fraud". It's hard to say more without knowing the context. This is the difficult thing with government by the pronouncement of Elon Musk. He can say stuff without any corroboration much faster than anyone else can check facts or correct falsehoods.

There's no fraud chud, my sources are 'skeptical'

In the meantime, it is exhausting how much effort is required to deconstruct one Elon Musk tweet. He can lie about very complex and technical systems much faster than he can be answered, but nevertheless it's important to periodically critically assess what the richest man in the world is saying as he continually tries to justify chopping the government up and selling it for parts like this is a private equity takeover.

Actually Musk is just lying, chud