The Annual Testimony of the Secretary of Treasury on the State of the International Financial System
Committee on Banking and Currency
2025-05-07
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Source: Congress.gov
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Transcript
under your leadership and only received a couple of cursory replies from your staff. Why don't you respond? Ma'am? I guess you don't know why you didn't respond. Secretary Benson, you worked in finance before, right? You will find bipartisan support on this committee for small businesses and the institutions that finance them. I worked with Trump's first treasury secretary to pass $12 billion in support for community development, financial institutions, and minority banks and credit unions. So I was surprised. when Trump first tried to eliminate the CDFIs, but it caught you by surprise also. You said that the CDFI fund plays an important role in expanding financial access. Unfortunately, you were not very persuasive last week. Trump proposed to basically cut all CDFI funding. Let's discuss your job before coming secretary. Your hedge fund had a secret sauce for how you would make money for investors, a proprietary trading strategy. As CEO, you guarded that strategy. You never allowed unrelated persons to access your firm's computer records, data, personnel files, and algorithms, right? And I'm sure you wouldn't have allowed just anyone unfettered access to copy, change, or to use those records, right? I suspect not. And that makes good sense. What doesn't make good sense is why, as Treasury Secretary and acting CFPB Director, you would allow those unfettered access to the government system that handles trillions of dollars in payments, to the proprietary business records of entities regulated by the CFPB, or most alarmingly, to the tax records of hundreds of millions of Americans.
But you still threw up the gates of our finance system open to Elon Musk and his band of 22-year-olds. Yes or no. Do you know the level, type, or nature of the clearances and security training required for individuals to access the information held in the computers of Treasury, IRS, or CFPB? Yes, I do. And I think we would have a disagreement over the definition of the word unfettered. Mr. Secretary, did all the individuals working with Doge who were given access to Treasuries and CFPB's computer databases receive all of the required clearances and security training before they were granted access? Again, they were granted read only access at Treasury. There were two. So let me just say those employees. You can't filibuster here. This is not the filibuster playground. And so what you did was you let these strangers into our treasury with access to all of the data, all of the personnel information, and you just open the door. Why did you do that?
No, ma'am. They were Treasury employees. Are you saying today in front of this committee that all of them were Treasury employees, that the 25-year-old who's being identified, who worked for Elon Musk, was allowed into the Treasury? Was that person there? He was a Treasury employee, as was Tom Krause, the senior person on the Doge team. There were only two people. There were Doge employees also. Do you know? Were you aware that there were Doge employees coming into our Treasury, getting all of our personal information? Ma'am, there is no such thing as a Doge employee. There were Treasury employees. I tend to disagree with you based on the information I have. Has any information been downloaded by anyone working with Doge from any of Treasury's or CFPB's computers answered yes or no? Not to my knowledge. You better learn.
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