In what must be the most ridiculous of all the collective sign-on petitions Democrats like to do, five Democrat-appointed Treasury secretaries, led by Larry Summers, have come out against DOGE.

According to Axios:

Five former Treasury secretaries warned in a New York Times op-ed Monday that the Department of Government Efficiency's access to the nation's payment system could subject "highly sensitive data" to the "risk of exposure."

The big picture: DOGE's reported entry this month into the Bureau of Fiscal Services payment systems, essentially the government's checkbook, sparked mass concern about the safety of sensitive data and ability to restrict federal funds.

• A federal judge on Thursday signed an order temporarily limiting the Elon Musk-led office's access to sensitive Treasury information to just two individuals with "read-only" access to the data.
• "The nation's payment system has historically been operated by a very small group of nonpartisan career civil servants," the secretaries wrote.
• They continued: "In recent days, that norm has been upended, and the roles of these nonpartisan officials have been compromised by political actors" from DOGE.

Driving the news: While the "significant data privacy, cybersecurity and national security threats are gravely concerning," the Treasury secretaries wrote, the constitutional concerns they hold are "perhaps even more alarming."

It was preposterous, a complete Democrat talking point scaremongering about data catastrophes that either aren't going to happen or that already happened. After all, didn't the Chinese already hack into the Treasury Department systems during the last administration, at least twice? Anybody put out some multi-signed letters from multiple Treasury secretaries about those? They fooled no one:

The pious puffery about "our democracy" is ridiculous, too, given that the left has tried that about a thousand times, ignoring the lawbreaking going on on the Democrat side. Everyone by now knows that their modus operandi is to accuse others of doing what they themselves are doing. We've been through that symphony of democracy agony during the election already. That, too, is going to fall flat.

Everyone can see what they are doing here: DOGE is exposing massive amounts of waste, fraud and mismanagement within the U.S. Treasury and all of that happened on their watches. What they're doing here is drawing attention to their fiscal mismanagement and bad stewardship of the public fisc instead of slinking away and hiding until the storm blows over, which if they had any sense, they'd do instead.

They're trying to get that DOGE spotlight off because the inevitable question that's going to arise is how they, them, Larry Summers, Janet Yellen, Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew and Robert Rubin, personally, allowed such waste and fraud to happen. And maybe there will be some questions about some of their bankbooks, too. I wouldn't put anything past Yellen, don't have an opinion on Lew, and look ruefully on Summers, Rubin and Geithner, all of whom had appeared to be fairly sensible from the Democrat side, until now. I really hope they weren't part of this grift.

DOGE's only mission is to find out how to make the government more efficient. They've recommended a coded system for payments to ensure that auditing the Treasury is actually possible.

That's because they've already found this:

...which should grossly embarrass these people.

With $36 trillion in debt, and the U.S. wasting $1 billion a week, it seems to be pretty basic to ensure that the U.S. doesn't become pre-Milei Argentina by taking some kind of action to control its costs with auditing capacity. Summers and Rubin, at least, would know that pretty well.

As Musk told Larry, using just the right tone:

All these guys are doing by this stunt is shining the spotlight more brightly on themselves, raising questions about their potential conflicts of interests that no one ever would have suspected in the past.

Smart move, brightboy. DOGE is going to find it all.

Image: X screen shot