Addressing the Hack of U.S. Treasury Payment Systems

Floor Speech

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Mr. CASTEN. Mr. Speaker, Haley Stevens and I introduced the Taxpayer Data Protection Act last week. This is a very simple but, tragically, an urgently necessary bill to address the hack of the U.S. Treasury payment system by Elon Musk and his band of IT goons last week.

This bill would limit the Secretary of the Treasury's ability to give access to the payment system only to people who: A, have a top secret security clearance; B, have no conflicts of interest; C, are not special government employees; and, D, have been Federal employees for at least a year.

Why is this necessary?

What happened last week comprised one of the most significant breaches of privacy and threats to our national security, perhaps ever. I am not exaggerating.

This was done with the consent of Treasury Secretary Bessent. This point is important because some of my colleagues across the aisle have suggested that somehow what they are doing is just normal diligence.

This is decidedly abnormal. It is so abnormal, in fact, that, when David Lebryk, the Fiscal Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and former Acting Secretary of the Treasury, refused to grant access to Elon Musk, Secretary Bessent fired Mr. Lebryk so that Musk could force his way in.

Let's understand the scope of what happened. The Treasury Department manages a $5 trillion-a-year Federal payment system. This is the way that every branch of government pays their bills. Like any accounting system, it is critical that all of the bills it pays are approved, legal, and accurately recorded in our ledger.

This is how we make payments on savings bonds and other debt borrowed by the United States. It is how we pay employees. It is how we pay contractors. It is how we provide foreign aid. It is how we pay tax refunds, veterans' benefits, and Social Security reimbursements. It is how we distribute money to our intelligence agents and to intelligence assets who are embedded in hostile foreign governments. Take control of this system, and one can, quite literally, destroy the United States. To put it mildly, it is a target for our adversaries.

Yet, last week, unvetted, unelected, and unconfirmed individuals hacked into that system using insecure software and hardware.

Did they tamper with the code?

Did they manipulate payment systems to prioritize payments to companies controlled by Mr. Musk?

Did they inadvertently use hardware that had been infiltrated by our allies?

Did they take classified information with them on the way out that could make them a security liability?

As we sit here right now, we don't know the answers to any of those questions. All we have is denials from the hackers.

Mr. Speaker, on what basis should we trust them?

After all, they forced their way into the system with the full consent of someone who lied to his wife and was convicted of 34 counts of fraud for lying to financial and election regulators. As the saying goes: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me every single time, shame on me.

I would suggest that we should instead trust what this individual said when he was on the campaign trail, when he promised to enact revenge on his political enemies.

Trump and Musk now have information that they could use to identify individual taxpayers who, I don't know, contributed to a charity that they oppose for selective retribution.

If they got control of the stop payment controls, they could now block congressionally mandated payments for healthcare, roads, and bridges; or to Governors or attorneys general who are currently suing to block their unconstitutional actions in the courts.

With the personal information that they have hacked into, they could go after judges who have forced them to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties after being convicted in jury trials of fraud and defamation, and they could go after companies who compete with one of their many private entities.

As long as those risks remain, we have to assume that this is going to make every single American less likely to trust that they can provide their personal information to the United States Government.

To put it bluntly, what they did last week compromised the full faith and credit of the United States. If the President and Elon Musk were acting under the direction of a hostile foreign government, this is exactly what they would do.

Mr. Speaker, I am not saying that they are. I don't know. What I am saying is that, if their actions serve only to weaken the United States, that is at the benefit of Russia, China, Iran, and all of the other countries that my colleagues across the aisle claim to love less than the United States.

A functioning Congress would provide oversight. A functioning Congress would be subpoenaing witnesses and demanding public testimony. A functioning Congress would be treating this like the five-alarm fire that every American understands that it is.

Yet, here we find ourselves knowing only that the Republican leadership is completely unwilling to fulfill their oath to defend our country against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and unwilling to protect the prerogatives of the House.

Mr. Speaker, I hope that I am wrong, but my fear is they are a lost cause, which brings us to my bill with Congresswoman Stevens.

I know that there are Republicans in this body who love our country. There are Republicans in this body who I truly love and enjoy their company, and I know that they have told me privately that they are offended and ashamed by what Donald Trump is doing to it. Some of the Republicans have even called it out.

All it takes now is for three of my colleagues across the aisle to stand up to ensure that these last 22 days are an anomaly in our history rather than the beginning of its end.

For any Republicans watching who are, shall we say, democracy curious in this moment, who privately acknowledge that this has gone too far but worry about the political and, worse, personal threats that will surely come if Republicans stand up to Donald Trump, I leave my colleagues with the empathy and the wisdom of Thomas Paine:

These are the times that try men's souls. Many will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country, but he that stands by it now deserves the love and thanks of men and women. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered. Yet, we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only that gives everything its value.

To my Republican colleagues: The times have found us, and America needs them.

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Mr. CASTEN. Stansbury).

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Mr. CASTEN. Moore).

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Mr. CASTEN. The first thing we do is make sure that unless you have a security clearance, a top-secret security clearance, you cannot access those records.

The second thing it does is, if you have not been a Federal Government employee for at least a year, you cannot access those records. You cannot access those records if you are a special government employee because, let's remember, we have to have oversight over the people who are doing this.

People need to disclose what their conflicts of interests are, which brings us to the fourth piece. You cannot access those records if you have a conflict of interest.

Let's just say, hypothetically, you were running a satellite company that had large contracts with the United States and were also doing business in China and you might have reason to gain that system, that would be a conflict of interest.

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Mr. CASTEN. No.

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Mr. CASTEN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Wisconsin (Ms. Moore) for her remarks.
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Mr. CASTEN. Mr. Speaker, Joseph Stalin said that one death is a tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic. When we talk about constitutional crises and hacks into $5 trillion systems, that risks sounding like a statistic.

I want to share just a couple of stories from my district--I represent, like all of us, \1/435\th of the population--to understand the real-life consequences that are happening now, first because of what Elon Musk and Donald Trump have done and second because of the failure of this body to fulfill its oversight role.

When these announcements came through, one of the first calls I got was from a local homeless shelter. They had been almost immediately locked out of their HUD portal. They were unable to receive any more payments. That means that 200 people in my community who thought they had housing for a cold night in the middle of January were at risk of being put back out on the street.

I got a call from a county health department that was wondering if they would be able to fulfill their WIC obligations. These are the payments to women, single women often, who have new children and are trying to make sure that they can get food. They didn't know what to tell these women, who relied on them for food and nutrition, about whether they would have the resources to keep their children alive.

The department of health and human services that called my office said that any pause of this legal, congressionally mandated funding could force them to shut down their employment and residential services offered to adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

What you do to the least of these, you do unto Me, right?

Four hundred people in my district and their families would have been shut out of that critical program.

I have heard from almost every single town in my district. Republican mayors, Democratic mayors, Federalists, Whigs, you name it, they are all calling and asking me whether the Federal Government will fulfill the obligations that they have underway for bridge repair, road repair, rail grade separations. They are wondering if they should continue those projects and potentially shift the risk onto their constituents.

What do they do if they don't have the borrowing capacity? If they have to shut down the project, can they finish it because it will probably raise the costs? This is all being done by a White House that claims to be pursuing financial efficiency.

At a local organization that provides victims of domestic and sexual violence with legal counseling, they have about 2,000 survivors they serve each year. They said that they are going to have to immediately scale back services and potentially close down entirely.

We are getting calls from people saying if a billionaire is so intent on cutting their access to Social Security, what happens to their health payments? I had a woman, who was a decent, kind, hardworking person, asking me if she should even bother paying her taxes this year because it is clear that Elon and Donald are dodging theirs and that they are defunding the enforcement agencies that would run an audit, and asking why she should even trust a Trump-led Treasury Department with that information.

These people are not limited to my district. They are not limited to people who voted for Kamala Harris. This hack affects every single one of us. Three patriotic Americans, Republicans, are all we need.

Houlahan).

Mr. KENNEDY of New York. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of the Taxpayer Data Protection Act. I thank Congresswoman Stevens and Congressman Casten for introducing this important legislation.

The American people deserve a government that protects their most sensitive personal information instead of one that allows an unelected billionaire to rifle through it.

The Treasury Secretary shirked his duty and granted Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to Treasury payment systems. This isn't efficiency. It is an outright betrayal of the public's trust.

Under this guise of efficiency, however, this administration has handed over Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries' private data to a billionaire with no oversight and endless ways to profit.

Make no mistake, this is not about improving government operations. It is about consolidating power in the hands of the few at the expense of hardworking families, at the expense of the 167,000 western New Yorkers in my district who rely on Social Security benefits and the 335,000 taxpayers in my district who file tax returns every year.

Fortunately, attorneys general from New York and 18 other States sued, and a judge has blocked Elon Musk's access.

The Taxpayer Data Protection Act would protect any unelected billionaire from having unlawful access to private and sensitive data. This bill would restore proper safeguards for the Treasury and ensure that no administration can hand over control of taxpayer data to an unelected, unvetted, and unqualified billionaire.

Mr. Speaker, we will not stand by as our institutions are auctioned off for the rich to profit at the expense of hardworking families. I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join me in defending the well-being and security of the people we were all elected to represent.
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Mr. CASTEN. Mr. Speaker, some people have said that this bill is unnecessary because what is being done by the White House is simply going after waste, fraud, and abuse. I want to explain why that is actually the opposite of what they are doing.

First, we have to clarify that all of us in this body are the fiscal custodians of our Nation's wealth. To allow corruption or waste to persist is to squander the taxpayers' hard-earned money. We are all aligned on that issue.

Second, I would note that while we certainly have had our share of financial scandals and corruption over our history, they have almost always involved the illegal transfer of wealth from the government to the private sector--from patronage jobs to no-bid contracts to inflated hotel rates for Secret Service agents at the Trump hotel.

There is a pattern there. The easy proof of that is that while our Nation seems to have a lot of billionaires lately, you won't find them among our country's TSA workers, air traffic controllers, food inspectors, IRS agents, soldiers, intelligence officers, or the numerous other people who have dedicated their lives to public service, which makes sense.

Those of us in public service have chosen to live lives of elevated public scrutiny. A free press keeps tabs on us. Inspectors general and whistleblowers exist to ensure that grift and fraud are caught quickly.

If the Trump administration were genuinely concerned about waste, fraud, and abuse, what would they do that would be consistent with existing law? That is pretty easy. They would submit budget requests to Congress to increase funding to inspectors general and whistleblower protections. They would notify Congress of specific areas where they believe this abuse is happening, ask us to pass laws to close loopholes, and increase funding for enforcement. They would use their bully pulpit to strengthen the rule of law, remind everybody that there is a higher ethical standard to live to, and demonstrate by their behavior that they live by that standard and demand it of others.

That is the exact opposite of everything they have done. They have failed to submit budgets. They have ignored Congress' congressional power of the purse, putting spending decisions in the hands of economically connected oligarchs. They have fired or are threatening to fire inspectors general and whistleblower advocates, making it harder for ethical Federal employees to call out fraud when they see it.

They are firing FBI and other law enforcement officers who could prosecute those crimes, including ones who have active cases ongoing. They seem to have a specific bias, I would note, against FBI officers who are pursuing prosecuting waste, fraud, and abuse against the Trump family.

They are pardoning people who assaulted police officers and sending a message to the American people that ethics don't even matter. If you ignore the law, you can ignore the orders of the court, according to JD Vance, because we are now living in a post- congressional era, according to OMB Director Russell Vought.

They are doing that while giving access to the Federal payment system to people who are not cleared and are massively conflicted. What they are doing is a case study in how to expand, perpetuate, and get away with waste, fraud, and abuse. A Congress that fulfilled its obligation to act as a check and balance on the executive branch would put a stop to that immediately.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

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