WATCH: GOP senators' rail against staggering $4.7 trillion in untraceable Treasury payments
Nearly one-third of Treasury payments a year lack proper identification codes, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent testified to Congress recently
May 26, 2025
Earlier this year, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uncovered $4.7 trillion in untraceable Treasury Department payments.
Prior to the discovery, Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) identification codes were optional for $4.7 trillion in Treasury Department payments, so they were often left blank and were untraceable.
The field is now required to increase "insight into where the money is actually going," the Treasury Department and DOGE announced in February.
"Of the 1.5 billion payments that we send out every year, they are required to have a TAS, a Treasury Account Symbol. We discovered that more than one third of those payments did not have a TAS number," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government earlier this month.
WATCH: Rapid Response 47 on X: ".@SecScottBessent: "There was no accountability. That is why the 450 organizations that sit above Treasury, where Treasury acts as the paymaster, are unable to pass an audit. So, we have cracked down on that. Every payment now requires a TAS number." https://t.co/4kq7wYzNY6" / X
Fox News Digital asked Republican senators on Capitol Hill to respond to the approximately 500,000 in untraceable payments made by the Treasury Department each year.
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"I'm not surprised at all, unfortunately," Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kansas, said before adding, "They were leaving complete fields undone when they were filling out their financials, so this is a common theme. I'm not surprised."
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Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Missouri, called for an investigation into where those payments actually went.
"There's so much waste. There's so much fraud, There's so much abuse in our government," Schmitt told Fox News Digital.
"I'm glad there was a laser-like focus on it. We ought to make many of those reforms permanent, but there probably ought to be some investigations here about where this money went. I mean this is taxpayer money. People work hard."
After DOGE and the Treasury Department uncovered $4.7 trillion in untraceable funds, Marshall and Sen. Rick Scott of Florida introduced a bill in March requiring the Treasury Department to track all payments.
The Locating Every Disbursement in Government Expenditure Records (LEDGER) Act seeks to increase transparency in how the Treasury Department spends taxpayer money.
"When you hear about this story that they didn't know where the money was going, it makes you mad because this is somebody's money, this is taxpayers' money when we have almost $37 trillion in debt, so this makes no sense at all," Scott said.
"We paid out more last year on our debt, $36 trillion in debt, with $950 billion in interest going to bondholders all over the world, including in China.
That $950 billion didn't go to build a bridge or an F-35. We paid more on the interest on debt than we did to fund our military," said Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska.
"That is an inflection point that when most countries hit, you look at history, that's when great powers start to decline. So we have to get those savings."
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Rail? How About ACTION? Trace…already done for your sorry asses! Warrants … yeah right! Nothing About Senators OR Congress is legit. They Do Not Represent The People. They Are Puppets! We Have Been Duped (for 200 hundred years)
RINOs will be our undoing if we do not kick them where the sun don’t shine from this point forward. Primary challenges are too far in the future. Demands for “due process” are “I am still building my pile of stolen funds, so no reforms on my watch”.