https://prospect.org/power/2025-02-06-private-equity-hatchet-man-leading-lost-boys-of-doge/
3 replies (most recent on top)
I am glad the he is uncovering the corruption. It looks like the people crying "save democracy" are actually the people exploiting it.
Well, it's not everyday you learn your boss is part of an actual coup against a democratic nation.
But here we are.
tl;dr
"Musk loyalists began badgering Treasury officials about accessing payment systems shortly after the election ... Bessent’s staff forced out the relevant gatekeeper and gave the DOGE team access to the systems. That team was led at Treasury by Krause, whose history at Citrix must sound creepily familiar to anyone working in the federal government right now.
...multiple young DOGE staffers ... had gained direct access to payment systems responsible for trillions of dollars in annual Treasury transactions and were literally rewriting the source code.
The Treasury Department claimed that wasn’t the case; that the access was “read-only” and limited to Krause and Elez, both of whom have been made temporary Treasury employees. At an emergency hearing to rule on a temporary restraining order motion a group of unions and nonprofits filed last week to halt DOGE’s access to the systems that process 88 percent of the payments in the federal government, summing to over $5 trillion, on grounds of violating the Privacy Act of 1974 and other protections of sensitive personal information
But the whole “read-only” thing turned out to be a lie, according to internal emails obtained by CNN. A week before Bessent’s confirmation, his chief of staff Daniel Katz began explicitly badgering then-acting Treasury Secretary David Lebryk to show Krause how to immediately pause all payment files “still in the queue” so he could examine individual payments. Lebryk objected, arguing in an email to Krause that he should consider “personal liability issues” before taking such a drastic measure.
Krause replied that he would “feel more comfortable” halting all the payments so he could “at least … review the underlying payment requests,” and added, true to his reputation:
“I would also recommend you consider an equal alternative liability.”
Lebryk was gone by the end of the week.
On Bluesky, the writer Anna Merlan voiced a sentiment no doubt shared by thousands of axed Citrix employees:
“Now the whole country gets the experience of what it’s like when private equity buys the place you work.”