There are a number of those. There are very elaborate requirements in federal law about who can control federal funds — who can issue payments on the behalf of the federal government. In all likelihood, the people involved do not qualify under those terms.
It also means that they’re getting access to extraordinarily sensitive private information that is covered by the
Privacy Act and a number of other statutes and regulations designed to protect the American people from identity theft. If reports that they’ve
copied this information onto other servers are true, and those servers get hacked, then many of us could have our bank accounts emptied by the federal government.
By contrast, Mr. Musk has been saying that he’s identifying false payments, or illegal payments, and saving the federal government
$4 billion a day or some enormous figure of that kind. There’s no reason to believe that the data in this system would allow one to tell what’s legal and what’s not, leaving aside the fact that Mr. Musk is not authorized to make those sorts of decisions. So it seems that there’s either wishful thinking or something worse going on in how they’re trying to justify this.