US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that US taxpayers do not need to worry about the security of their personal data, while Elon Musk's Government Performance and Accountability Office team seeks to make the federal government more efficient, UNN reports citing Bloomberg.
Details
The DOGE team, led by Musk, has identified likely savings of $50 billion so far, Bessent said in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday. "So that's a very good start," the US Treasury Secretary said.
He added that cost-cutting efforts could eventually result in "a few percent of GDP that we save.
Meanwhile, Bessent said Americans "shouldn't be worried about any of this," referring to the team's attempts to access a wide range of taxpayer data, including individuals - efforts that have prompted Democratic lawmakers to raise privacy concerns.
A team from the Government Efficiency Department is looking for the data, but has not yet been granted access to it, Bloomberg reported on Sunday.
Bessent said that one person in the tax service "studies the outdated IT system, that's all they do.
Bessent said that two people at the Finance Ministry had "read-only access" to the payment systems, meaning they were unable to make any changes. "There are very strict restrictions around them," he said.
Democrats in the Senate have widely criticized Bessent for what they call a "lack of candor" about what DOGE employees are doing with U.S. payment systems.
Last month, the newly created DOGE gained access to the US Treasury payment system. This prompted a senior official who had been trying to block the move to abruptly resign. Attorneys general from 19 states and three labor unions have also filed lawsuits to prevent DOGE from accessing the confidential system.
Asked whether the US would stop minting new pennies, as Trump instructed earlier this month, Bessent said the president "wants the pennies to go away. It's part of the cost savings." "It's going to happen soon," he said.