The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) discovered an identification code linking U.S. Treasury payments to a budget line item, which accounts for nearly $4.7 trillion in payments which was oftentimes left blank.
‘The Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) is an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item (standard financial process),’ DOGE wrote in a post on X. ‘In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible. As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going.’
The agency thanked the U.S. Treasury for their work in identifying the optional field.
According to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which is under the Treasury, TAS codes are used to describe any one of the account identification codes assigned by the Treasury and is also referred to as the ‘account.’
All financial transactions made by the federal government are classified by TAS when reporting to the Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
The discovery was announced on the same day DOGE appeared to have populated the DOGE.gov Savings page, which, as of Monday evening, said the total estimated savings since the establishment of the department total about $55 billion.
The savings are a combination of ‘fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings.’
‘We are working to upload all of this data in a digestible and fully transparent manner with clear assumptions, consistent with applicable rules and regulations,’ DOGE wrote on the site, adding that the data will be updated twice per week until eventually becoming real-time.
Musk is leading DOGE to aggressively slash government waste when it comes to federal spending under President Donald Trump.
The department was created via executive order and is a temporary organization within the White House that will spend 18 months carrying out its mission.
The group has faced criticism over its access to federal systems, including the Treasury Department’s payment system, as well as moves to cancel federal contracts and make cuts at various agencies.
Attorneys general from 14 states are suing to block DOGE from accessing federal data, arguing Musk and Trump’s administration have engaged in illegal executive overreach.
The newly formed cost-cutting agency scored a win on Friday when a federal judge in Washington declined a request to temporarily block it from accessing sensitive data from the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Fox News Digital’s Hillary Vaugh and Stephen Sorace contributed to this report.
