What is Elon Musk getting up to with America's payment system?

On the morning of January 28th, April Mullins-Datko, the director of ADVOCAP, a social-services provider in Fond du Lac, a city of 40,000 people in Wisconsin, put in her usual request to draw down $250,000 to pay staff salaries and other expenses connected with Head Start, a federal program that provides child care, education and food to families on low incomes.

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Every other time ADVOCAP has done this, the money has arrived within 48 hours.

This time it did not. As of February 9th, ADVOCAP has received just $44,000 of the $250,000 they were expecting. To pay their workers, they have had to use bank credit. If the money does not materialize soon, they will have to begin laying off staff and shutting down their Head Start program. The result will be 202 children without services and 80 staff members without jobs.

ADVOCAP appears to be a victim of Donald Trump's seizure of the federal government's payment systems. Its money should not be missing, according to the White House. A memo that froze much government funding, issued late on January 27th, was quickly rescinded after an outcry and a court ruling. Yet ADVOCAP's money has not turned up and nobody seems able to explain why.

Ms. Mullins-Datko says she has been calling anyone she can, but "they're not responding. I've heard nothing from them." She has received only one insight: "I called the Office of Head Start central office in DC and they said, 'Oh, we're sorry. This isn't an Office of Head Start problem. This is a Treasury Department issue.'" Guidance sent to NGOs by the National Head Start Association, which represents service providers, confirms they too have been told that the problem is with the Treasury.

That clue connects ADVOCAP's glitch to a bigger question that has roiled Washington over the past week: Exactly what has Elon Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency", or DOGE, been doing inside the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, a once-obscure but sensitive area of the Treasury? This is the part of the government responsible for paying out roughly 80% of the nearly $7 trillion that the government spends each year.