Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced a breakthrough Tuesday, declaring that the Department of the Treasury has blocked $334 million in improper payment requests in its first week using a new automated verification system.
It’s the latest success from DOGE, which has championed major reforms in federal spending oversight under the Trump administration.
“Last week, Treasury went live with its first automated payment verification system. In total, $334 million in improper payment requests were identified and rejected,” DOGE announced in a social media post on Tuesday. The rejected payments were flagged for “missing budget codes,” “invalid budget codes,” or “budget codes with no authorization.”
The automated system represents the next phase of reforms targeting a massive financial tracking problem first identified by DOGE in February. At that time, the government efficiency unit revealed that approximately $4.7 trillion in federal payments had been processed without proper identification codes that would allow the transactions to be traced back to specific budget authorizations.
“The Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) is an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item (standard financial process). 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 wrote on social media platform X in February.
Reforms were put into place last week —
Last week, Treasury went live with its first automated payment verification system. In total, $334 million in improper payment requests were identified and rejected due to:
-Missing budget codes
-Invalid budget codes (i.e. the payment was not linked to the budget)
-Budget codes… https://t.co/Jmuc1cj9D7— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) April 29, 2025
The Treasury Access Symbol serves as a critical identification code for appropriations, receipts, or other fund accounts, and is used to classify all federal financial transactions for reports to the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget. Without this code, government watchdogs have virtually no way to track where taxpayer money actually goes.
DOGE announced in February that the Treasury Department had made the field mandatory as of that month.
The Department of Government Efficiency, created by President Donald Trump after his re-election, has taken on several high-profile investigations into government waste and fraud. The unit has become known for its direct approach to exposing bureaucratic waste and fraud, with Musk frequently posting findings directly to social media.
In a related investigation, DOGE has been examining potential issues with Social Security Administration records. Musk shared an image in February showing what he described as millions of people aged 110-149 years old listed as alive in Social Security databases.
“Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” Musk joked.
The payment verification system’s early success is part of the growing influence of DOGE beyond just identifying problems. The unit has also been credited with aiding other federal investigations, including the recent Department of Justice case against Akeel Abdul Jamiel, an Iraqi national charged with illegally voting in the 2020 election.
“Thanks to our partnership @DOGE, this DOJ has charged an Iraqi man for illegal voting in the 2020 election,” the Justice Department said. “If you are a foreign national and vote in our elections—you will be prosecuted.”
U.S. Attorney John A. Sarcone III described Abdul Jamiel’s alleged voting as “a callous and illegal act” and promised that authorities “will continue to investigate and prosecute illegal schemes aimed at corrupting the election process.”
The Treasury’s new automated verification system appears designed to apply the same aggressive approach to financial oversight, creating automatic rejections for payments that lack proper authorization or documentation.
The $334 million in blocked improper payments shows reform is already results in protecting taxpayer dollars.
Still, critics have urged DOGE to cut deeper and do more — and quickly.
“Musk’s target savings have fallen from $2 trillion annually, to $1 trillion and now $150 billion, its “wall of receipts” has verified just $2 billion of savings — or 1/35 of 1 percent of federal spending,” Manhattan Institute’s Jessica Reidhel said in a recent opinion piece for The New York Post. “The rest of the claimed savings either were not specified or consisted of major mathematical and accounting errors, such as confusing an $8 million cut for $8 billion, canceling contracts that ended decades ago and triple-counting the same contract cancellation.”
Musk must go deeper, she said, otherwise “Trump supporters may be surprised at the end of the year when — after all the tweets, promises and headlines — spending and deficits have sharply climbed again.”