This primer explains what the Bureau of the Fiscal Service does, how it has traditionally been managed by career civil servants, and the risks posed by tampering with the system.

A federal judge early Saturday temporarily blocked billionaire Elon Musk's government efficiency team from accessing government systems used to process trillions of dollars in payments, citing a risk that sensitive information could be improperly disclosed.

The US Treasury Department’s payment servers hold the tax returns, social security data and bank account numbers of every adult citizen of the United States. They are, one would assume, among the most highly secured servers on earth and yet it seems that all the employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) needed to do to access these systems after January 20 was to walk into Treasury Department offices and demand access to the servers’ credentials.