NEW: Elon Musk credits Treasury workers who wanted to remove fraud but were 'stopped by prior management'

On Saturday, DOGE head Elon Musk said there are federal employees in the US Treasury Department who have been stopped by previous management when the employees wanted to identify fraud among those getting money from the federal government. 

Musk posted on X a long list of things he has heard during his time at the US Treasury, including rampant fraud by people getting payments from the Treasury amounting to what he thought to be $50 billion.

He was then asked by a user, "How is it possible they all knew there was $50 billion in fraud and they didn’t DO ANYTHING????"

Musk replied, "Nobody in Treasury management cared enough before. I do want to credit the working level people in Treasury who have wanted to do this for many years, but have been stopped by prior management. Everything at Treasury was geared towards complain minimization. People we [sic] receive money don’t complain, but people who don’t receive money (especially fraudsters) complain very loudly, so the fraud was allowed to continue."

In the list of issues posted on Saturday, he said that DOGE and the Treasury have “jointly agreed” on a number of things, including that it takes up to a year the “do-not-pay" entities list to update with organizations that are “known to be fraudulent." Other categories on this list includes those who are dead as well as “probable fronts for terrorist organizations,” Musk said.  

He added that the list cannot take that long to update, and must be "updated at least weekly, if not daily." He also said that DOGE and the Treasury would be implementing a payment categorization system, as many of the payments did not have these before. He added that not having this feature makes “audits almost impossible.” 

“All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!" Musk continued in his post. 

"Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious," Musk later added. "When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!!" 

Musk was appointed by President Donald Trump to head DOGE, and his team of young programmers has drawn the ire of Democrats as well as left-wing pundit and media in recent days as they worked with the Trump administration to cut down the waste at the US Agency of International Development.