Nathan Tanks the Economy: An Oral History of 100 Days of DOGE w/ Nathan Tankus (05/05/25)

Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Nathan Tankus to walk through an oral history of the early months of DOGE's ongoing infiltration of the Treasury payments system and Social Security, why the "Trump-Musk Payments Crisis" threatens a bigger fundamental threat of US economic breakdown than even Trump's tariffs, and why Nathan tried (and failed) to crash the stock market.

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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)

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[ chime ]

Nathan Tankus  0:01 

So I decided to walk home from Bloomberg Studios. You know, I live in Chelsea, and I was called by a source, a former Trump staffer source, to try to get me off this story. And trying to feed me this like, "What are you even worried about? Like, you know, this has all been blown way out of proportion." So I'm at like 28th Street and Ninth Avenue, right next to a church actually, and I start getting really pissed off, and I start going, "No, that is not true at all! You need to get those fucking children out of the Treasury before they kill us all!" … I freak out everyone on the block.

[ Intro music ]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:05 

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I'm Beatrice Adler-Bolton and today, I'm joined by returning guest and dear friend of the panel, Nathan Tankus. Nathan is the President of Notes on the Crises. Nathan, welcome to the Death Panel. It's so great to have you back.

Nathan Tankus  1:55 

It's so great to be back.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:57 

Now over the last few months, and especially over the last two while we were out on parental leave, DOGE and the Trump administration have been steadily ripping through the federal government. They've done this under the banner of so called "cutting waste, fraud and abuse." But if you've been listening to our recent episodes, especially the ones that we did before the break, you know that what's actually underway is a kind of administrative coup. This isn't about fiscal responsibility. It's about consolidating authoritarian control by dismantling the infrastructure of the state and rerouting its functions towards more explicit forms of racialized repression and eugenic exclusion.

The US is already a settler capitalist state built on extraction, abandonment and death-making, but this is a sharpening retooling for what comes next. And Nathan, you are one of the most indispensable analysts of this moment. Over the last few months, you have been doing critical, meticulous reporting, tracing not just the front-facing political spectacle, but also the very deep, structural changes that are happening under the hood, especially around federal payments infrastructure, administrative functions, the loss of expertise, the architecture of economic governance -- I could keep going [laughing].

But, you know, we're calling this the economic crisis check-in, but that barely captures it, because the Trump/Musk payments crisis, as you've been calling it, is actually much more than that, because while media attention has really fixated on tariffs and the kind of chaotic posturing around global trade, which has been and is important, Nathan, you've been sounding the alarm about something much more fundamental and much more important.

The Trump administration, through DOGE, is actively reshaping the machinery of the federal government in ways that could cause cascading crises, not just for the so-called economy, but for anyone or thing or industry who relies on the state for survival. And it's worth saying explicitly from the top, the "waste, fraud and abuse" framework is a cover. Just like we've said before, "waste, fraud and abuse" is never about waste. It's about pretext. It's about using the language of reform to mask a project of racialized austerity and authoritarian consolidation.

So what's really happening is an attempt to bypass existing agencies, evade oversight, and selectively defund or gut programs or entire branches of the government without having to say the quiet part out loud. It's about cutting without calling them cuts. It's about targeting disabled people, poor people, racialized populations, anyone the administration deems disposable -- trans people -- while building a parallel system to funnel resources and power to those they deem worthy. So this is a crisis not just of budgets or of money, but of power. It's about the dismantling of administrative systems that deliver resources, whether that's food assistance, Social Security, Medicaid, FEMA response, you know, I could keep going, but the idea is that they can be redirected, delayed or denied altogether. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, the state is not just prisons and jails, it's schools and libraries and rural hospitals too.

And that's why today, we're going to do a check-in on what's happened in our absence, what's at stake, and we're going to talk about why Nathan believes this payments crisis represents a much more fundamental threat to the norms and functioning of the US state than it might appear at face value. So with all that said, Nathan, just to open us up here, while all eyes have been on trade wars and tariffs, you've been emphasizing that the real deep, existential threat is what DOGE is doing behind the scenes. Can you start by walking us through why you see these administrative moves as potentially deeper, more dangerous shifts in the so-called normal operations of the state?

Nathan Tankus  5:25 

Sure. I mean, I think before we start to talk about the Trump/Musk payments crisis, we need to take a step back even further to think more broadly and more fundamentally. And what I'm referring to here is how the normal budgetary process of the United States federal government works, and how it gets broken in a fundamentally unconstitutional way. And in constitutional law, the way I'm talking about is impoundment. And impoundment is just a fancy term for the executive branch not spending what Congress says to spend. So when Congress passes a budget every year or passes a law creating a more fundamental program with a more durable funding structure, like, for example, Social Security, effectively, what it is doing is directing the executive branch to spend. And over the long sweep of American history, there has been an increasing move to lower the discretion of the executive branch and for Congress to spend exact amounts of money, or exact amounts of formula money.

And you know, this is, of course, especially familiar with state and local government -- formulas for funding, you know, especially in the earlier decades of grants and aids, the classic 50s and 60s funding of state and local governments that, for example, Death Panel co-host Phil Rocco writes and comments on a lot. And it kind of makes sense that back in the before time, there would be a lot more discretion for the executive branch, because it's a big country. Even with the very beginning, you don't even have railroads and telegraphs for communicating information, so you need to give some leeway to -- you know, sometimes spending a certain amount of money just doesn't make sense anymore.

But as technological change and how government works has fundamentally been transformed by a set of institutional changes that come with those technologies, Congress has taken an increased amount of the reins. It designs formulas to just say exactly how much should be spent based on the set criteria. For example, people applying for disability, or how inherently, you're going to be paying out more money the more elderly people there are that qualify for Social Security, and so on and so forth.

And then also just exact amounts of spending. Congress directs that $11 billion is going to be spent by this agency in this way, and it expects that exact amount of money to be spent. So this is -- we're talking here about the fundamental architecture of the constitutional organization in the United States. And obviously that goes with all sorts of positive and negative things, regardless of how we normatively judge all that and judge the US state as it exists.

This, as a descriptive matter, is how this system works. And I've put such emphasis on impoundment because impoundment is a way in which you violate the Constitution in a way that, generally speaking, from a progressive or a left-wing angle, is particularly pernicious because it involves sidestepping Congress and kind of hard fought -- the left fought very hard in this country to get Social Security and other kinds of programs, and sidestepping that, where the executive branch, the imperial presidency gets to just decide how things work and what gets spent, and abrogate all of those hard fought battles that, for the extent that we get anything positive out of the US state, it comes fundamentally from getting legislation through and pushing legislation through that gets money spent in the ways that are life-making rather than death-making. And before even really the payments crisis had come on the radar, within literally three or four days or something like that. Beginning of the administration, like maybe a week, this was already happening. This was already under attack.

It's sort of been buried by so many things that had been going on already, but you know, on like January 27th, like one week in, the Office of Management and Budget issues this shock memo that is supposed to be implemented 24 hours later, that says you have to check whether XYZ spending that you're doing in your agency is consistent with these executive orders that we put January 24th, and these executive orders are like, you know, "Fighting Gender Ideology" and like,"Against Marxism and the Green New Deal." Literally, they have this stuff in the titles. I don't remember exactly what it is, but like --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  10:16 

Yeah, we covered that in two episodes, one with Phil and then one with Melissa Gira Grant, who came on the show. It was like, the language was really extreme, but what it was hiding was this really important technocratic detail that you're highlighting here.

Nathan Tankus  10:30 

Exactly. And so what happened with that was it created a whole panic in the administrative state. They were just suddenly -- like, literally, the next day, the portals -- and we'll get back to what these portals are in a bit, because it gets really, really important and really important in the payments crisis story -- but these portals in which -- in all 50 states for say, Medicaid, to get spending and approve spending for Medicaid, all went down.

And it's not exactly clear, you know, I still haven't seen strong reporting on exactly how that played out, but basically it seems like the agencies themselves froze the portals for a bit just to try to figure out what the hell was going on and how they were going to deal with the implementation. And so, this caused such a ruckus that the Trump administration pulled the OMB guidance on how to implement these executive orders, but very quickly, it was clear, they're not giving up on impoundment just because this OMB guidance was too extreme.

And so I already was very alarmed, because they were playing with impoundment. They were saying that we can legally just say, if this is not according to the President's priorities, we don't have to spend the money. So it's already extreme, already what I was calling, and in a piece that I had done that Friday, January 31st, Friday morning, was calling that a five-alarm fire constitutional crisis. And that's just the appetizer to the main meal, is a -- I'm still, like in my heart of hearts, hoping to get back to that five-alarm constitutional crisis. It would be really nice to lower the sense of alarm back to that level. And so this is really where things open up for the Trump/Musk payments crisis, what I, at first, called the Trump/Musk Treasury payments crisis -- we'll get into later why it's now just the Trump/Musk payments crisis -- and this is where I became more at the center of the story.

So I put out my piece. I'm already getting attention for covering this, and an article drops in the Washington Post by Jeff Stein, and I think some others. And I saw the headline, and I just, I couldn't click yet. I had already been kind of staring into the void a little bit with already -- just with the impoundment stuff at the basic conceptual level, because I saw very little -- and it's played out this way -- very little kind of checks and balances on them just moving forward with impoundment, which we'll get to, you know, the Supreme Court is six Republicans, three Trump appointees. You're a sucker if you believe the Supreme Court is really going to fundamentally rein this in.

So I see this headline, and this headline says that a top Treasury civil service employee has been pushed out as a result of fighting DOGE, you know, the "Department of Government Efficiency," so-called, Elon Musk's little pet organization, from denying them access, like operational access, to the Treasury's payment system. And that concept is so alarming that I just like -- ugh, I haven't eaten food yet, I've been busy promoting my article, I can't yet. And then Stephanie Kelton had already read it and sent some message that was like, oh -- you know, the economist, who's a good friend of mine -- and she was like, "Has anyone read this? Like, I'm freaking out. Why isn't everyone freaking out?" And I had a little commentary of, like, you know, people are just tired and beat down. And I was like, I haven't clicked the article yet. I haven't been able to bring myself up to. I'm gonna eat food first and then go read it. And she was like, “that's the wrong order.”

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  14:14 

Oh my god.

Nathan Tankus  14:15 

And what she meant was, I'm gonna vomit it -- I'm going to like vomit up my food reading the article. And it's a pretty reasonable comment, because I started reading this article finally, around, I don't know, 2:50pm, 3:00pm or something, January 31st, and my whole life changed. Within four paragraphs in, I had a panic attack, just straight-up panic attack. And that's not something -- it's not like I'm having panic attacks every month or even every year, like, I don't know, I don't remember the time before that I had a panic attack.

This was four paragraphs in, and it's because all the implications came rushing towards me, rushing in my head, and also the obscurity of the issues that were being played with. And so what the article said is that the top civil servant of the US Treasury, David Lebryk -- so when we say the top civil servant, what we mean is that they come through the professional service, they're promoted through the professional service, what's supposed to be kind of a firewall, partly through law, partly through norms, to the political appointees, the people who are actually just directly picked by the President, or they have to be -- you know, they're subject to nomination by Congress, and generally speaking, these people are seen as just like, they are just trying to do their job as effectively as they can. And Lebryk had been in the Treasury since 1985, before I was born. You know, a lifetime devoted to this. This is a person who did really heroic work making sure that the COVID checks went out on time, and it took a lot of effort on his part. We can talk more about that later, or maybe even another time.

But if someone like that is, you know, I am going to resign, or I'm going to -- you have to fire me if you're going to get direct access to the system, if you're going to interfere with the work going on at a bureau at the Treasury, someone like that, extremely mild-mannered, you know, you can have whatever judgment you want, but like someone who, for example, did not resign over the genocide in Palestine, like you take someone like that, and they feel like they have no choice, that they have to resign, and that will be better for the world, for them to resign, than to be there with all their knowledge and expertise? That is extremely alarming.

That means that what they want is a fundamental threat to any semblance of democracy in the United States, and the possibilities of what they could do with that direct access were mind boggling. As we've kind of seen now, it's played out for months, I had it all in a flash in my head, all the data that they could break into and take and use for all sorts of nefarious purposes, all the ways in which they could use that information to target specific people, download that data and you plug it into X Payments LLC, you know, X to everything app becomes the commercial payment system everyone has to use, because it has all your information, and it's trained on all sorts of data that no one else could possibly ever get access to. But the most fundamental threat constitutionally, or just the fundamental, overall structure of our society, was impoundment.

So remember back to the OMB, individual agencies had to make decisions of how they were going to respond, and individual agencies, as we've seen, can decide, okay, I'm going to follow what a court order says, or what the law says, rather than what I'm being ordered to from on high. And it's a pain. Like, you know, around that same time, they physically took over USAID and broke in and took control physically of the building. And that's -- that's hard to do. That's hard to do. You have to go -- I mean it just like literally, on a physical level, oh, I gotta go to this agency building. I gotta go to that one. That's a pain in the ass. Fundamentally, like beyond everything else, it is just a stressful, annoying thing that you might fail. Courts might get involved. Protesters, you know. It's much easier if you can press a button. And clearly, from the beginning, Elon Musk has been fantasizing about pressing a button, and it's just like, make the thing that I want to go away, go away by pressing a button. And direct access to the Treasury is what they were aiming to use to do that, and direct access operationally to the payment system, with the idea that if I don't like this payment, even if that agency is not an agency I can control, well, I just won't -- we just won't process that payment.

And so that's what they wanted to build. And I saw all those possibilities in my head in that moment, and it was just too much. And that's why I had a panic attack. That's why I immediately started messaging Jeff Stein at the Washington Post to get more information about this story, you know, and when I made clear that I wanted to write about it, called me back immediately.

But that was like after, that I taken a shower, and I just screamed in the shower. I've never really -- I've never done that before, but I was just trying to create an environment where I could scream as loud as I can, and it wouldn't freak anyone out in my building or whatever. And so I was just like -- I just screamed at the top of my lungs, because it was too much. It was too overwhelming.

And you know, that last layer, to be very real, that part of being overwhelmed was not just how fundamental a threat this was, but at some fundamental level, I knew that, at least in large part, this was going to be up to me, because the media environment in the United States is fundamentally desiccated. People don't have the expertise that they built up maybe within a normal newsroom in like the 50s and 60s, they often haven't built up that expertise. The same thing that's true, Congress is desiccated. All the think tanks, which I got this confirmed later, talking to sources, only hire political appointees and don't hire former civil service people and train them up to study those systems.

And while at the same time, I knew that I had an email of 50,000 people, that I have a big Rolodex of former government officials, and even have some peripheral connections with current government officials, you know, I had a credibility as this sort of like nerd person who had spent the last year, year and a half, FOIA-ing the Federal Reserve and creating a database of like 30,000 pages of minutes, of meeting minutes from 1967 to 1973, that like -- you know, if someone -- if I'm saying that there's some fundamental threat to the functioning of the United States, and someone's rolling their eyes and going like, who is this guy, and then they're scrolling and scrolling and seeing the like -- frankly, the boring nerd shit that I'm -- that I spent like years writing about, they're like, oh shit, this might be actually real, because this guy just -- this guy doesn't put like -- you know, he doesn't put things that are the attention-grabbing bullshit headlines. He excitedly puts a headline on something that sounds like the most boring thing I've ever heard. And now he's writing these other headlines, and it's like, oh. Oh shit. Yeah.

So, I knew at some fundamental level that this was on me, and I called -- I had conversations with a half a dozen former Treasury and/or Fed officials within like 24 hours or so of reading that article, or like 36 hours, and that's basically the message I got. I mean, it was like -- it was a lot of like, they work in the private sector now, or this or that, and they don't feel capable or willing to step out. And the end of the conversation is sort of like, looking forward to your article Monday morning, Nathan.

And so I am just totally panicked, trying to get myself together, you know, get drunk that night, try to calm down a little bit, de-stress a bit. And then I got up at 8:49 the next morning, and I basically worked for 19 continuous hours on a piece, analyzing all this, and looking up all the databases and looking up all the technical government documents that could tell me about the systems that were involved, which we'll talk about in a bit. And just worked 19 continuous hours, from 8:49am to 5am the next morning. In the meantime, someone I know, someone who used to work at The Lever, reached out, who's now a Rolling Stone editor, reached out, Andrew Perez reached out. Saw that I had been tweeting about it or whatever, and said, hey, you want to do this for Rolling Stone? And I was like, this article is way too complicated for Rolling Stone, but I could do an abbreviated version if you can edit it down. And it managed to work it out, work it together, that I could simultaneously run, you know, 6:00am, 7:00am, an article in Rolling Stone and my own newsletter, where at top and front, I'm like, if you work for the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which is the bureau in the Treasury that runs the Treasury payment system, here's my Signal information or my email, get into contact, and which we'll get into, ended up working extraordinarily well. But I kind of put out the analysis that -- you know, saying exactly what was going on.

Our link, the headline in my article was, "Elon Musk Wants to Get Operational Control of the Treasury's Payment System. That Could Not Possibly Be More Dangerous." And so I ran through the ways that they were just trying to do what I called like payment-levels impoundment. And to be clear, when I wrote that article, I did not have it confirmed that that's what they were trying to do. I just strongly believed that that was what -- that was the point. And as we'll see in the subsequent weeks and months, that was confirmed, and confirmed well beyond doubt that that is what was going on.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  24:25 

Yeah. I mean, it's like based on their actions, it was pretty clear where they were going with it, especially paired with, as you're saying, the OMB memo from late January. Now, just to roll us back, again, to Day Zero, I would love to just like walk through what happened next and talk through the whole story. I know so much has happened in the last couple of months, but I feel like if you don't look at this story in the right way, it can just really easily seem like very dry, administrative details, but that is basically as far from the truth as it is, right?

As you've documented, Nathan, the plan and what was being put in place, what became immediately obvious to you, why you felt sick, why Stephanie was like, don't eat before you read Jeff's piece because you'll throw up, is that this was like bureaucratic sabotage of the innards of the state, right? Like in so many ways, this is a great way to learn about what the state actually is and how it works, regardless of how you feel about the state, like this is functionally how it works, right? The way that money flows through the state and becomes things like public schools, Social Security, etc., is really complicated in some ways, but it's also really simple. The Treasury and this payment system, maybe you could start by talking about a little bit like how central this is, because maybe folks might not be totally familiar with -- you know, I'm just gonna assume people aren't necessarily familiar with like what the Treasury payment system is.

But it's hard to understate just how structurally important the Treasury payment system is to making everything go. In a lot of ways, you can think about the government as a series of norms and a group of people that enact the governance, but it's also this payment system, right? Like we make decisions, Congress makes decisions about how they want to spend money, that's passed as a law. The agencies and the executive branch are tasked with making that law real, with actually taking what was passed and implementing it. And the way that this all happens is that these Treasury payments are the blood that flows through this whole circulatory system, right?

So states get this money for Medicaid, and they issue these payments from their account, they rely on these regular payments from the Treasury that are tied to how many enrollees they have and to certain other like technocratic details, but it's like what happened, even when the OMB memo went out at the end of January and there was that temporary shutdown, is that you saw certain Medicaid funded services for people with disabilities, like small orgs literally not have money to stay open all of a sudden, because those Medicaid payments were stopped for even just 48 hours, right? Like, even just a slight delay in this system results in a breakdown of things not being able to function as normal.

So I wonder if you could just talk about how the payment system is a kind of plumbing, right, how it works, and then I think that helps to emphasize why this is beyond a five-alarm fire. And then, once we talk about how that payment system is really this important architecture for how each piece of the state moves, like this is the provisioning, right? Like, this is the directive to enact government priorities, spending on whatever, whether that's something that we believe in or not, it's about how these things actually function.

And then, so can we start with that, and then walk through after that first piece went out, you started hearing from people who worked -- when you put out a request for sources to come forward, you started hearing from people, you started to get more details, so I'd love to just talk about that architecture for just a second, and then zoom back into what happened Day Zero forward, how this began to unfold from there.

Nathan Tankus  28:37 

So I think the way I would start with this is if you've ever gotten a government payment, if you've ever gotten a payment just directly into your bank account, or you've gotten a check and then taken that check and deposited it in your bank account, I think that you don't really think about what's going on underneath that. You just think, okay, the government sent me a payment, and then I got a payment, or the government wanted me to have money, and then they sent me money, and it's like ---

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  29:05 

And now it's there. Yeah.

Nathan Tankus  29:07 

Now it's there. So what else -- what else is there? What else do you even need to know? That's just a kind of fundamental approach, and it makes sense, because why does it matter in your day-to-day lives? It should only matter to people like me, and if you have to know about it to know what's going on, something's really, really wrong.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  29:29 

[Laughing] Yeah.

Nathan Tankus  29:30 

And what you find here is there's a whole set of institutions that the payments have to be processed through. And even -- I should say even for experts, or so-called experts, most people just go one layer in. So at another layer, there's like, okay, you have a bank and you have a bank account. You, as an individual. Your bank has an account with what's called the central bank, the Federal Reserve. And so when the government or the United States Treasury is going to send you a payment, then it sends a payment from its bank account at the Federal Reserve. The payment gets wired over to your bank, and then your bank pays you after, or in the same process as it gets credited with a payment. So for most experts, that is sufficient detail, that there's the Treasury initiates a payment, it goes through the Federal Reserve system.

The Federal Reserve system gets the payment to a bank, and the bank gets the payment to you. Even to experts -- and that's already kind of -- it's a little complicated. You gotta follow a few chains there, but to experts, that's sufficient to understand that. Well, myself and a few other people have been interested in this further layer, this further layer that's really sleepy, that previous to like four months ago, you couldn't get really anyone to give you any detailed answers about how this system worked, and that is -- we call the Treasury's internal payment system. So yes, the Treasury has a bank account with the Federal Reserve that it sends payments out of, but the Treasury is not the entire federal government.

There's a whole infrastructure out there that's a backend. You know, consolidating the rest of all these agencies in with the Treasury might be useful for lots of purposes, but if you want to understand how the money is actually flowing within the federal government, you have to disaggregate. You have to look deeper, look closer, and what you find when you look closer is that this bureau in the Treasury, the Bureau of Fiscal Service, actually itself has a payment system. And why does it need that payment system? It needs that payment system to route payments from the agencies to get to the point of initiating a payment or initiating debiting or subtracting money from the Treasury's bank account and then getting it through that rest of the process that I was describing.

There's another further step. So the Treasury, in the language of economics or payments, you would say that the Federal Reserve is operating as a payment intermediary between the banks and the Treasury. Well, the Treasury itself, and specifically the Bureau of Fiscal Service, is serving as a payment intermediary between the agencies and the rest of the economy and the rest of the payment system. There's the key intermediary. They are a key artery, like they're the payment's heart of the federal government, as I said all the way back in my piece in February 3rd, they're the payment's heart. And if that payment's heart has a heart attack, if it collapses, if it stops functioning, then payments do not go out. Even if the Federal Reserve can still process payments, there's no payment.

Because it's not like the federal government has one payment to send, it has millions of payments to send. And so for the money to get routed in the exact amounts that it's supposed to go out and get to the various -- the hundreds of thousands, the millions of a bank accounts that those payments need to go to, the Bureau of Fiscal Service has to process all that information, and the agencies themselves have payment information, and there's a standardized process by which payments are sent from those agencies on to the Bureau of Fiscal Service, and then through the Bureau of Fiscal Service, through the Treasury, onto the Federal Reserve and the wider payment system.

Each step is important, and at the basic fundamental, technological level, our systems, in large part, have been -- are locked in from an infrastructure set up from the late 50s through the 70s. And that infrastructure is -- you know, it's been updated a little bit here and there, but fundamentally has not gone through a full fledged modernization project, or more fundamentally, a redesign project. It went through a fundamental redesign and restructuring through this process over like a 15, 20-year period, from 1959 through basically most of the 70s. And we basically have not done a fundamental redesign to the payment system since.

And as a result, there have been a lot of like freaky systems, and a lot of layers and layers and layers of new fixes to new fixes to new fixes, which makes these systems quite complicated and make people like David Lebryk absolutely crucial to keep these systems functioning. And what -- the implication, the thing that filled me with terror was the idea that they were going to try and get into that heart, get into that payment's heart, and design it so that when payment information flows from an agency through to the Bureau of Fiscal Service, at that point, they could just grab payments, and I needed, wanted to get into the details as much as possible to understand how operationally they could grab payments and how quickly they could build an architecture for picking and choosing what, of what Congress has ordered to be spent, actually gets spent and sent to the people that it's supposed to be sent to, or the entities that it's supposed to be sent to.

That was the danger. And then there was this also danger, which is not so much them succeeding, but in the process of trying to do impoundment at the payments level, they just break the system. They just shake it and break it. And if they break it, then that means the payment system goes down completely in a way that may not be fixable, and that means no -- if that happens, then that means no payments go out. And if no payments go out, basically, I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that the United States stops existing, for all intents and purposes, within a matter of weeks. I think it's no exaggeration to say that if this payment system is not processing payments, then the system just goes down, and that there is no way to kind of quickly slide in.

The hospitals very quickly stop functioning. All -- I mean, and so on and so forth, throughout all these different implications, you know, if the federal government just stops functioning, which is essentially what we'd be talking about, if payments weren't going out, then we're done. I mean, we're just -- we're just done. And there could be silver linings you could find in the world, from the United States just outwardly and suddenly collapsing, but it would be a global crisis of just proportions that you can't imagine or wrap your head around.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  37:09 

Thank you for laying that out like that, Nathan. It's such a complicated and nuanced point, but it's so -- it's so important. I often shorthand this to like, in discussions, you know, when you have maybe [an] organizing discussion about, strategically, are we going to work within the state or against the state, to like, well, we need to be thinking of the state not as a benevolent actor, but as a purse, right? That the most important architecture of the state is this payment system. Everything moves because of this payment system. It is the act of provisioning. And the government might pass a law, but the way that it actually becomes materialized and enacted is through this payment system, right? This is what actually keeps the United States running.

This is why the US currency is the kind of global power that it is. And we've also, for decades, really enforced this international trade order that relies on the reliability of the US payment system, again. So it's one of those things where it's like, this is sometimes the risk of organizing within the state, where all of our organizing strategies, for example, are about trying to win funding over versus trying to build alternative systems and ways of meeting each other's needs that don't directly rely on these systems of funding that are without it, because it is vulnerable to the kind of wild but absolutely happening circumstances that you've been documenting. So I really appreciate you laying that out with the stakes so incredibly clear, because I think it's easy to joke about the US ceasing to exist as a result of the second Trump administration, but what you're really talking about is like, how would that happen? This is how it would happen.

This is how the US would collapse. This is what collapse would look like. This is the beginning of it, and it comes from this angle that is obscure, right, that requires the unique expertise that you have to even make it make sense to someone who's not -- what did you joke, that you were like -- you're just like into incredibly nerdy, boring things. But in some sense, it's conceivable that they might not even realize how dangerous their actions are, right? Because it isn't something that anyone doing this tinkering, that anyone involved in DOGE or even the Trump administration is at all knowledgeable about the implications of what they've been doing, right?

Like they might have their direct agenda that they're trying to enact in this circumstance, and there is no way that they even have the expertise to understand what would happen, for your example, like if they were to accidentally break the payment system, even temporarily, right? This is something that you -- you have a panic attack because you realize, you really had a lot of pressure on your shoulders to try and figure out a way to take this scenario and make it obvious to people, because it's what has been playing out.

Nathan Tankus  40:16 

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's very hard to communicate this kind of thing, you know, for multiple reasons. One is just like, the ego of it or something like that, but it really is -- like, I mean, it's preposterous to be in this situation. In some sense, it's something that I foresaw, but not to the speed and scale and rapidity that it has come. I always knew that this was a crucial bottleneck that could really be messed with, but the fact that they're going at it so quickly, I mean, that they started going at it, they already were trying to get access to the payment system during the transition and Lebryk was stonewalling that, you know, as long as DOGE wasn't an official agency and the Trump administration wasn't officially in, but they were pushing to get access within the first few days.

And you know, you notice, even just him getting pushed out, he's pushed out 11 days in, including weekends. That's an enormously short amount of time for it to reach that level. So, it's not like I acquired this knowledge with the like, oh yeah, this is going to be the big thing, you know, Treasury internal payment systems, that's what you get into when you want to make the big bucks. It's not -- that's not why I got into it. Like, of course, I thought it was important, but I just also just have a fundamental drive, because I want to understand every nitty gritty and I don't feel like if I don't -- if I don't understand how all the pieces fit together, I don't feel like I fundamentally understand it.

And clearly, that is an unusual drive, and in our wider society, where so many institutions have been defunded and de-resourced, including Congress itself, it means that when you have that unique, fundamental drive to just do it on your own, without funding, without really anything, then you can get yourself into a very extraordinary, unique situation. And there's things that I know, or interactions I've had that I can't talk about, but what I can say is, fundamentally, institutions across the most powerful parts of our society were caught in the lurch and had no ready-made expertise.

As I briefly commented on, think tanks, they hire political appointees and they pay them the big bucks, former political appointees, because those are the people that are near the top, and it doesn't occur to them that, hey, maybe you should have a team of hiring former civil servants to research how the civil service functions and use their connections to build up an understanding for this fundamental architecture. And as you know, at Death Panel, there's a fundamental neglect of those details.

There's a fundamental -- there's a reason why Death Panel has been such a unique source in its own realm, because being obsessed with the details, frankly even just knowing how to read a technical government report and going where the important things are from your curiosity rather than going for what your kind of bosses say, or just the kind of normal trajectories that lead people to research something or not research something, and pretty extraordinary people started accessing my email list, started getting into contact. Like without specifics, I would say the heads of major programs and some of the most important think tanks in the country have personally had phone calls with me, off the record, about what's going on, and I can't be more specific than that, but I have been told some pretty -- and I've also been told some pretty wild stuff about my reputation right now, which is pretty -- very extraordinary, by the way, given that I've been like writing or tweeting or whatever, about the genocide in Gaza for over a year. And that's pretty unique.

And in fact, I even got -- you know, I can read these from a piece I did last month where I got two former senior Treasury officials from the Biden administration, including one that, by happenstance, left the Treasury on the same day that Lebryk did, on January 31st, on the record both about what was going on that week and also explicitly naming my role in it, you know? So one is from former senior advisor to the US Treasury, Chastity Murphy, "Former colleagues and I, both within and beyond the Treasury building, were deeply concerned about Elon Musk's operational access to the Bureau of Fiscal Service's payment system. Many, including senior officials, turned to 'Notes on the Crises' for insights into the unfolding situation."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  45:16 

Pretty wild.

Nathan Tankus  45:17 

Then, a second former senior advisor to the US Treasury who, by the way, you know, subsequent to all this, I'm pulling in to start doing IRS investigations for me, and I should have the first parts of those series out not that long from now, Anisha Steephen explained, "The alarm among the most former senior and current Treasury officials came from the truly unprecedented nature of what Bessent and Musk's DOGE were doing. Never before had political appointees taken over the operation of the Treasury's payment system or interfered with it in any way. We universally felt there was a major risk to the integrity of the payment system and broader economy given its outsized importance... Notes on the Crises provided the most in-depth view of what was going on at the Fiscal Service. Most importantly, Nathan elevated the issue beyond the usual DC circles and explained why it mattered to people. Americans pay attention when an issue like this is in Rolling Stone." I mean, I got those quotes and they're printed in my newsletter. It's extraordinary to have such kind of quick confirmation about the importance of your own reporting to what is going on and notice, you know, I said my own reporting, I've been doing kind of technical, sleepy things. And like I was thrown into the maw of being an investigative journalist basically by reading that article on January 31st. And you know, we'll get into the subsequents later but, you know, my whole world has changed, and obviously my -- what was my newsletter and is now essentially my publication, is entering a fundamental new phase, now, in the midst of all this.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  46:56 

Yeah. I mean, it's wild, but there -- none of us here at Death Panel were surprised, having known you for many years now and known how thorough you are and how specific your expertise is, that when this happened, your analysis became so important to people who, for any number of reasons, would have maybe previously considered you politically untouchable, right, you know. So we are still early on in the story. So, after this first piece came out, you started getting -- you started hearing from people, as we were talking about, we started getting some confirmation of your reporting. Let's talk about what happened next and how this proceeded from there, because I think we have a really good groundwork now for exactly how unusual this moment really has been, both for you, but also just within the general history of the United States, this has been a moment where the baseline norms of the US as a country, as a government, as a whatever, as a state itself, have been shattered and upended, and that's really just the starting point of the story.

Nathan Tankus  48:15 

Yeah, I mean, we're recording this on May 4th, in the evening, Eastern Standard Time, and that -- where we're at, at the story is still fully three months ago, Monday, February, 3rd. I mean, we're only really a weekend plus a day into the story in terms of, now, I've had the piece simultaneously run in my newsletter, in Rolling Stone, and I knew pretty -- I, you know, for obvious, kind of obvious reasons, I had real trouble sleeping Sunday night. And I finally cracked -- and, of course, I'm talking, promoting the article a bunch, I'm talking to a whole bunch of people, and at 7:00pm, just short of 7:30pm, I finally crash out.

I finally sleep, because I've been up all night, so I crash out. And I think I'd even already gotten a couple emails from some former Bureau of Fiscal Service people, but overnight -- or post-7:00pm, as I'm sleeping, I start getting Signal messages from current Bureau of Fiscal Service employees. I get emails while I'm still asleep at like 10-ish PM, by a Wired reporter or an editor, Tim Marchman, about some wild stuff that he's heard. And it's with -- he's emailed me with the same information that are in my Signal messages that I haven't checked yet. So I get up at like 1-ish AM, or like 1:30am, something like that. And I'm up, ready to go, ready to roll some more.

I check my messages, I see these messages from the current Bureau of Fiscal Service employee, and I see that while they're waiting for hear back from me, Wired has run with the reporting, 1:00am, that -- so to back up, the reporting started coming Friday night and Saturday, that DOGE, the "Department of Government Efficiency," that Elon Musk's people, that they had read and write access to Bureau of Fiscal Service systems. And I was about to say, and what that means, but actually, at that point, it wasn't exactly clear exactly what that meant, or what was meant by that, because the people doing this reporting do not particularly have database management or the requisite coding expertise, because these are like mainstream articles coming out, New York Times, Washington Post, so on.

So it's not clear exactly what this means, but the interpretation at the time was that this was the ability to read the code and write the code, and so that they could -- and read these systems and just look through these systems, and they could restructure them however they wanted. And that's enormously dangerous, because you can imagine, there's the further layer, these are 20-something programmers, they don't particularly have familiar[ity] with the underlying programming language, which is called COBOL, which was introduced literally in like the early 60s.

But most importantly, forget the language, becausethere's all this BS, beyond the BS of like, oh, well, you can get an AI thing to write the code or whatever, it's that specifically, there's what's called business logic. And the concept of business logic is that there's like specific things that have been written into the system. So for example, you might have a programming language or just abstract English, but in Death Panel -- actually, this is a great example. The phrase "death panel," the kind of business logic within Death Panel, the Death Panel community, is that Death Panel is the name of the podcast. It is the name of the podcast. The phrase "death panel," the words "death panel" don't inherently mean podcast. I mean, when you read it, the reference you're making with that is the Obamacare era debates over quote unquote death panels, and how, for example, insurance companies, as we know, have their own death panels essentially, but without the specific context, without -- you can kind of call it the business logic of the Death Panel podcast, you don't know that Death Panel refers to a podcast.

And this is kind of a simple, silly example, but it's really the fundamental issue is that there's a thousand different things, of this means that, this means that, if this then that, that are not inherent to the language, they're not inherent to the English language, and they're not inherent to any programming language, and they're not inherent to COBOL, but they are relevant in the specific systems. And these systems have been constructed, with some updates, but fundamentally throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000, to this day, and they've been changed at various points to do different things.

And the documentation, quote unquote, of how these systems work are the people themselves, are the long-standing, as people like to say, the graybeards, who understand these systems, who know how to program them. And to have some 20-somethings who are going to come in and say, oh, we're going to do a whole bunch of stuff and we're going to launch up Deep Seek or whatever, and have it start changing code for us, is fundamentally terrifying. We'll get into this more, but the reporting that I did, that Wired did, the others did, essentially came to like the quote unquote graybeards, the people with expertise in this system, were helping DOGE do what they wanted to do out of terror that DOGE would just go ahead and do what they wanted to do on their own and break these systems. So it seemed over time, but absolutely was not clear in the moment, February 3rd, that the people there were taking the lesser evil of helping them -- kind of helping them do what they wanted to do, just so they wouldn't fundamentally break the systems.

So there's that fundamental danger, but it's also just these are very complicated systems, and to try to rush through changes that usually take months and years of testing, of running systems concurrently, it's an absolute nightmare. And so the idea that one of these people would have direct ability to read and write, and not to mention read and write, also the interpretation being that they could download all the data, that they could change data, go into those systems and change data, which could have all sorts of deleterious effects on people's lives, was fundamentally terrifying.

And over that weekend, people started -- you know, people within the administration started kind of having a very vague concept that there were issues here, and that people were freaked out about what they were doing. And so they started anonymously leaking to these mainstream journalists that, oh, don't worry, they only had read access, not write access. Now the issue there is, first of all, you can read the code and come up with ways to change it with read access. And if you've already gotten rid of someone like Lebryk, there's no protection that the code isn't just going to be changed at your direction, and that seems to be precisely what happened.

But also, read access is still the ability to go and download the data. It's just not the ability to change it in the system itself, or at least it could be without much more detailed understanding and reporting on exactly what people mean by these terms.

And of course, you know, the mainstream journals don't really have a sense. They're going by what sources are telling them, and those sources are manipulating them and lying to them. So it's still a fundamentally dangerous situation, but the second layer was Wired says actually, it's read and write access, this sort of anonymous source thing that it's just read access isn't true. And my sources that had come overnight confirmed the same thing. So I put out a piece at 7:30am, only six and a half hours after Wired, and Wired has an entire team.

I had, you know, my computer and my external monitor in my room, and I was -- I was the first source, post that point, to confirm the reporting on Marko Elez, this 25-year-old former SpaceX employee, and that -- because I had put out this gigantic piece, I had spent the weekend writing, that was the fundamental framework to understand this. And really there was no other writing, and kind of no other writing still, to really fundamentally understand what the danger was and what the issue was. And the very next day, the next morning, 24 hours later, I have another piece. I have another piece out there.

So we're really operating in a fundamentally different world. By very lucky happenstance that day, I was scheduled to record an interview at Bloomberg Odd Lots. You know, Joe Weisenthal is a very good friend of mine, and we were going to talk about the 30,000 pages of FOIA that I got. And that's not what we ended up doing, but it was the perfect opportunity to record an interview on what I had just put out there. And so that was the next step, the next layer. And I go to that interview, and I go into that interview, as I wrote about only for the first time last month, with the intention, even though I knew it was very unlikely that I would pull it off, but with the intention of crashing the stock market.

That was my intentional -- like, in my mind, this is definitely -- I even had an argument with a former Bureau of Fiscal Service source, who was freaked out by the concept when I said it, and I explained why it was important and why it mattered. And so I went and just laid out the story.

And that was a huge opportunity, because that was the first major business coverage, and certainly the first major business coverage that really elucidated what the stakes were. So I record that interview that Tuesday, and I'm trying to crash the stock market for the reasons that we've now seen with the Trump tariff crisis. That tariffs, you know, oh shit, they're serious about tariffs, and they're serious about doing it -- stock market crashes. That puts pressure on the administration, pressure that it has resisted to an extraordinary extent, to remove the sanctions, and without the stock market crash, there's no pressure.

And that was -- and then so I had this in mind. I had been thinking about this actually because -- and kind of solidified my thinking, basically since Trump was elected, because of a piece Joe Weisenthal wrote, where he referred to playing on some 2010s things in austerity discourse, the concept of a stock market vigilante, that like stock market traders were these kind of vigilantes, and that they were a kind of constraint on the behavior of the Trump administration. And one of the things I said at the time is this is really interesting and important and historically important, but, you know, people just don't inherently follow stock market crashes. They have to be socialized to go, oh no, I need to back off. And it was an open question whether Trump would really be backing off because of that, and that's kind of played out how I thought it might, although obviously on a much more extraordinary scale and a much more dramatic scale than I thought.

But nevertheless, I'm like -- I'm, at that point, I am really freaked out. You know, DOGE is still in the system, Marko Elez, read and write access. I am trying anything. I want to get popular pressure. I want to get protests going. But it's like, hey, if a stock market crash will do it, let's do a stock market crash. And not like, well, I'm trying to manipulate the stock market, I'm just trying to communicate accurate information about the danger and telling you, you should be pricing that in to financial markets, that clearly didn't succeed for reasons that even Joe Weisenthal comments in -- at the epilogue of that interview, but that's my intentional goal.

[ Screen Reader Voiceover Introducing Clip ]   1:00:54 

Odd Lots podcast, February 5th, 2025.

[ Audio Clip — Tracy Alloway, Odd Lots Podcast co-host ]  1:00:59 

The other thing I was thinking about was, you know, Nathan's kind of warning towards the end about the market, just overlooking a lot of this. And I kind of remember, in the first Trump administration, do you remember one of the rating agencies came out and they had a little piece warning about US credit worthiness, and saying, like the rule of law gets eroded, and that's kind of bad. It's weird that we haven't seen a lot of that over -- I guess it's still early, It's happening so quickly, but like there hasn't been any of that in the past two weeks.

[ Audio Clip — Joe Weisenthal, Odd Lots Podcast co-host ]  1:01:35 

Well, look, the way I would think about it is sort of like the debt ceiling, which is that the market will freak out when something happens, right? But before that, like if something happens and there's a payment system, something gets broken, then we're gonna see a market freak out. But everyone, until that moment, is just always operates like in the end, the payments will be fine. I don't think financial markets are good at situations like this, where it's very binary, right?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:02:04 

I remember texting you like the night before, because we had asked you, do you want to come on the show and talk about -- you know, we're like you're probably super busy and please sleep, but do you want to come on the show and talk about why this is important. You were like, sorry, I have to go on Odd Lots tomorrow, gonna try and crash the stock market [Nathan laughing]. And like, I was in the kitchen with my feet propped up, like super pregnant, you know, Artie and I were pacing around the kitchen, waiting to text back with you, because you had just been through the most wild 24 hours already at that point. And we were like, okay, well, you know, now we have to watch Bloomberg tomorrow. Great [laughing].

Nathan Tankus  1:02:41 

Yeah. And so the interview ended up coming out Wednesday, 4:00am. But meanwhile, I'm trying to take a little pressure off and take a little time off. So I decided to walk home from Bloomberg Studios. You know, I live in Chelsea. And at the same time, I had already been called -- this is a story that both is too long and I can't get into, but I was called by a source, a former Trump staffer source, to try to get me off this story and trying to feed me this like, what are you even worried about? Like, you know, this has all been blown way out of proportion, but he hadn't even read my reporting. And I was like, read my reporting, guy. And then I was like, go back.

But then he took a second swing at me, when I was on the walk home, when I was almost home, he called me and I won't say the things that he was saying to me, you know, technically speaking, it was an off the record call. But in essence, he started basically getting into this idea that like, A) civil servants would just react to anything, and that's just how civil servants are. And they just -- they have no sense of proportion.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:03:57 

They're “hysterical.”

Nathan Tankus  1:03:58 

They're “hysterical people,” exactly. It was just --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:04:01 

Wow.

Nathan Tankus  1:04:03 

They're hysterical. And so I'm at -- where was I at? I was just about to be home. So I'm at like 28th Street and Ninth Avenue, right next to a church actually, and I start getting really pissed off. And since I'm in my office, which we'll get to that concept too in a bit, I think I will just yell at the level that I was going at, and I start going, [yelling and voice gets louder as he goes on] no, that is not true. That is not true at all. You do not have any idea what you were talking about. I am doing everything possible to get those children out of there. You need to get those fucking children out of the Treasury before they kill us all. [normal speaking voice resumes] And in fact, I'm not even getting anywhere near the level. I would really need to build up way, way more. I freak out everyone on the block, because you need to -- like I'm wearing --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:04:55 

Get the children out of Treasury.

Nathan Tankus  1:04:57 

A dress -- I'm wearing a dress coat, you know, business clothing. And it's kind of alarming. It's alarming either way.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:05:04 

Oh, to be on the block when you were doing that, to see people's faces.

Nathan Tankus  1:05:08 

[laughing] Yeah, exactly. No. People were really, really freaked out. And I was just like -- yeah, I don't know, in a lot of ways, that was a very cathartic thing to do, and kind of got some energy out, because I got to actually, you know, give it to one of these motherfuckers. And so I don't -- I don't even remember the rest of that day, but I start working on more stuff. You know, I now have these regular sources, and I start working for my piece the next morning.

And now it's just like, I'm less so even doing these sort of deep dive pieces that I'm more used to writing, I am just doing more just straightforward, bare bones reporting in a certain way, not getting into it. And so I'm running a piece that Wednesday about the details of what's going on, and I'm giving direct quotes, and really, frankly, some of the best, kind of most alarming quotes about what was going on that really dramatized the situation.

So the Treasury had been denying the reporting, essentially like my reporting and Wired's reporting, and then also Talking Points Memo had a little bit of it, and they had actually some even -- some of the most interesting things. But like the main people really covering Marko Elez were Wired and I, and Wired is an entire publication with a huge staff, and I am me. I'm just like a single --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:06:42 

Just Nathan.

Nathan Tankus  1:06:42 

A single person. So there's a letter to Congress officially denying that Marko Elez was given read-write access, and my source responds, which I published Wednesday morning, "Treasury's has been denying that they gave Marko write access, but I am looking at these access request right now and it has the Deputy Assistant Commissioner for IT Operations instructing the team to disregard all previous instructions and assign Marko read/write privileges for the database." Like I -- and, you know, that is the most kind of direct quote that, I mean, on that issue. And at the same time, my Odd Lots interview dropped Wednesday, 4:00am, and I can tell you for a fact, some very high level government officials saw that interview and also checked out my reporting.

And I mean confirmation beyond the quotes from the two former senior Treasury officials. And I think, I'm pretty confident, but in ways that I can't officially just claim in terms of like here's what was done, or what was said, or blah, blah, blah, that the Odd Lots interview really is what broke through, because Odd Lots is listened to [by] a lot of extraordinary and powerful people in our society, a lot of very rich people, but also people in government.

And it is Bloomberg, it is business. Financial reporting is different from just say it's in some other outlet, or it's in Wired or whatever. And I was dramatizing it to the hilt in that piece, I went for the jugular. And even if what I was saying wasn't sufficient to crash the stock market, it was sufficient, or easily sufficient to freak out a ton of people who were listening, including government officials at the various highest level. Like I say in that interview, there is no way to exaggerate how enormously dangerous this is. Every financial market in the world, in the country, in the world, should be pricing in the operational failure uncertainties of this system. Every single financial market should be pricing it in, and none of them are. None of them are even close.

And then from there, Joe Weisenthal does an assist to absolutely clarify that we're talking about Treasury payments going out. We're talking about Treasury interest payments going out, specifically payments on quote unquote the national debt. And he's saying that specifically to highlight just -- like what I mean when I say this is extraordinary failure, because for a financial market audience, even though this is really not fundamentally true about the world, but in their minds, the idea of a treasury government -- of a government default on Treasury securities, is the most catastrophic thing they can imagine.

And so that -- what I'm saying is relevant to that topic, is the way to really, really hammer it to a financial audience. And you can imagine, if you're in the Treasury, and you hear me say that on Odd Lots, and you know that I'm talking about your conduct, is that kind of threat and you -- and you know, going back to what you said before, or what you asked before, that he fundamentally doesn't understand -- that these people probably don't understand, like Treasury Secretary Bessent probably doesn't understand still, to this day, the full scale of what he was playing with even a little bit.

And I think probably, at this point, he's just in full denial, and that is enormously -- first of all, that is enormously alarming in its own right, that they're doing such catastrophic things they don't understand. But from their point of view, they might think, oh, I'm full of shit. But now they know many of the most powerful people in this society think that and also, they're calling these people to tell them that, and tell them that they think that, likely. I can't confirm that, but it's pretty, pretty likely --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:10:46 

Stands to reason. Yeah. 

Nathan Tankus  1:10:47 

It stands to reason. And so that Wednesday, his access gets changed, and I'm -- and I have a follow-up piece, which that's a first. That is a Notes on the Crises first, to have a piece out, and then to have a piece out in the afternoon of the same day, that is -- that's a marker of just how bad the crisis is. I mean, you can go months without a Notes on the Crises piece, and now suddenly it's like, we're getting multiple pieces a day. That's where we're at? That's not good. That's not good at all. And so I'm the first one out, you know, I beat Wired. I beat Wired by 36 hours, that Marko's access was changed, that they freak out that Wednesday and they start changing. And I'm like, I'm reporting on what they do, we're talking a matter of hours after they do it, which means that if current Bureau of Fiscal Service sources, they're telling about it to me during the work day. I mean, we're talking about something that's absolutely extraordinary. I mean, that is -- you know, that's the stuff of investigative journalism movies, like that's the stuff -- that is like All the President's Men level, kind of secrecy and such. These sources, I don't know who they are. I don't have access to them anymore. All information about them has been deleted. Any notes that I took are deleted, like there is nothing. There is no ongoing relationship or connection between me and these people, except, if, you know, hopefully they're reading my pieces somewhere, and if I say, hey, come back from out of the woodwork, maybe they'll come back.

But that's -- I mean, we're talking about me going from sleepy Federal Reserve stuff to having that kind of security, you know, that kind of operational security to protect sources, which I've gone -- I've gone from like kind of just basically a normal kind of newsletter writer, to that kind of journalism in a matter of five days, really less. And so, I then have the next day, and there's even more stuff. Don't even get into the details of what it was that day, but I again, have another wave of two pieces, and I am, at this point, I am at a really, really high stress level. I am really highstrung. I've worked about 100 hours this week, counting from -- basically from when I read that article on, that seven days, I've worked about 100 hours in that seven day period, and it's not like I wasn't working the week before. And I'm really stressed, and the fact that the Marko Elez situation hasn't been resolved, is like really getting at me, and then the news suddenly drops around, like -- what was it, like 3:49pm, something like that, just after I put my afternoon piece out, the news comes out that Marko Elez has resigned because of, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of racist pieces. Because, you know, racism is a real -- there's a no tolerance policy of that in the second Trump administration.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:14:04 

Yeah. This was the person who had the positive tweets about eugenics.

Nathan Tankus  1:14:09 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:14:10 

Yeah. But clearly, you know, there was a whole deeper angle to the resignation and it was attempted -- I mean, I think it was JD Vance, even, who started tweeting out things about how Elez was the victim of cancel culture, and trying to pivot into this thing of like, he shouldn't have gotten fired because of his opinions or whatever, which I think, a deliberate attempt to direct people away from the actual story, right? Because, if you're like, well, why has this one person been fired, when the other DOGE employees, I guess, you know, operatives or whatever, are still doing their jobs, it's a much more convenient story to say, oh, this is cancel culture. This is people being upset about something he said, not the truth of the matter, which is, as you reported, the fact that what he was doing and the permissions that he had been given to these systems was so worrying to the gears of power, that that resulted in his dismissal, right? Like they are not dismissing him because of these tweets, right? And I think that it's interesting to even see that you have someone as high up as JD Vance engaging in the public misdirection effort to try and draw people away from the reporting that you've been doing.

Nathan Tankus  1:15:35 

Yeah, and I think it's hard to tell exactly, because one thing is, and one way that this could be playing out is simply that they come up with this cover story. He gets fired, or he gets effectively pushed out, he resigns. And the issue is there's -- you know, it's the Trump administration. It's chaos. It's two weeks in. So they're not all on the same page about a cover story. And you know, you imagine, you're these fascists, you're looking around and you see this cover story, and you're like, what, for racism? Come on, you know? And so I think there's a strong possibility, although, as you say, it could also be playing to misdirection, that JD Vance and Elon Musk and these other people were just like, you know --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:16:23 

What the fuck, you know?

Nathan Tankus  1:16:24 

What the fuck, for racism? You know, didn't -- like I -- the last interaction I had, or not even interaction, the last message I sent to the former Trump staffer source, when this dropped, I, at 4:00am that day, after spending a lot of time unwinding, right before going to sleep and sort of sleeping in, I messaged the former Trump staffer source, "Resigned for racist tweets? What is this, the Jeb Bush administration," as a sort of, just like razzing him, and because it's like, yeah, this sounds like some Jeb Bush or some comedy shit. I mean, this is second Trump, come on. And there's definitely that sort of visceral -- that visceral feeling, but this -- yeah, this got all the way to Trump, because he got asked about it at a press event. And asked specifically about JD Vance wanting this guy to be rehired, you know, give him a second chance. And Trump said, Did you say that? And he said, Yeah. And he's like, Oh, I agree.

And of course, Trump has no idea what the situation is, but, you know, Trump says, go rehire Marko Elez. Marko Elez is getting rehired, but he gets rehired, but he doesn't get back at Bureau of Fiscal Service. So he's not my problem, or at least he's not my problem for a while [chuckles]. Can sort of -- and I couldn't psychologically handle any more of it. So I just needed to be like that part is dealt with, and I need to be able to take the weekend. And so I take this long weekend from like Thursday night on, I try to cool off and get back to it the following week. And now I'm in it. So my world has changed. Like Krugman is already citing my stuff the middle of that week, and he -- at the culmination of this, on like Friday or Saturday or something, he calls me the man of the moment, which is --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:18:19 

So weird.

Nathan Tankus  1:18:19 

For Paul Krugman to say that, at that point, you know, not having any previous relationship, antagonistic to the school of thought that -- school of economic thought I'm involved in, he's just like, gets it in that moment to respect the work and you know -- well, we can get into, like we ended up -- he's done two interviews for me, because he recently left The New York Times, and he's done two interviews for me, video interviews with transcripts on his Substack that he let me post videos of on my YouTube channel. I'm now monetizing YouTube just on the strength of those two Krugman interviews. And that's two Krugman interviews, like two Krugman interviews in seven weeks. Absolutely extraordinary. And like --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:19:05 

That's so weird. That's so weird.

Nathan Tankus  1:19:07 

It's very weird. It's, it's -- I don't know when I'll ever get used to it.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:19:12 

I mean, you want to hear a funny story?

Nathan Tankus  1:19:15 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:19:15 

So March 1, the first interview with Krugman comes out, and we had just had the baby, and I -- you know, a couple days before, and Artie's in the NICU with the baby, and I am stuck in mother and baby on my magnesium drip for severe pre-eclampsia, and you know, it's 3:00 in the morning, and I'm reading this piece, reading the transcript on your blog, on Notes on the Crises, of the interview with Krugman, like going, oh my god, I can't believe there's now one degree of separation between Death Panel and fucking Paul Krugman. Like, what reality is this? And a nurse comes in to do a blood pressure check, and I'm laughing, and she's like, oh, you know, why are you laughing? Is everything okay? I'm like, oh, I'm just reading something. And she's like, oh, what are you reading, you know, just to be polite. And I blurt out, well, I'm reading this interview that Paul Krugman did with my friend Nathan, and he just said, what are we gonna do if you get hit by a truck? [Nathan laughing] And she looks at me like, what the fuck are you talking about?

Nathan Tankus  1:20:23 

[laughing] I mean, I managed to hold myself together for that interview. And that was an extraordinary strength of will.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:20:33 

I mean, we were -- Artie was joking that, you know, maybe the only thing that Death Panel and Krugman agree on is that we would be really upset if Nathan got hit by a truck [laughing]. 

Nathan Tankus  1:20:44 

Yeah, exactly.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:20:45 

But that is, again, evidence of just how unusual your expertise was for this moment. Krugman has been a commentator on this for decades at this point, and he needed your reporting to make sense of the moment.

Nathan Tankus  1:21:02 

Yeah. I mean, and frankly, if there had been a more mainstream commentator, if there was a commentator that he felt like he could get this information from, I think, you know, strong chance he would have --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:21:11 

He would have chosen literally anyone else.

Nathan Tankus  1:21:12 

He would have gotten from them, and it's like no -- I mean, that's a kind of measure of what we're talking about. Like, you know, Krugman got it from me because I was the source. I was the person to talk to, and there was no one else available. And frankly, that's why many high level people in many different parts of our civil society, people who would never give me the time of day in a million years, on January 30th, 2025 or any date before that, are reaching out to me, are in contact with me, are having phone calls with me. And it's an extraordinarily unique leverage point. And I'm putting that into expanding, because the skill sets I have, the skill sets that have combined together to become a powerful tool for investigative journalism, even without needing specific sources, but then having the credibility to get current and former government officials to be sources of mine, and people in financial markets and blah, blah, blah, banks and hedge funds and all this stuff, you know, the limitation on how I can expand is just kind of the administrative capacity to expand and the funds. And so I've been kind of doing this leap. And I have big things that I can't say, you know, on the record yet, that are coming. One thing I can say, which I think I mentioned that, you know, I'm going to have a full investigative series on the IRS that I'm contracting out. I've started doing legal memos and commissioning legal memos on quite important legal issues, and distributing them for free.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:22:54 

When you say you've got a series on the IRS coming out, do you mean like on the -- what the Trump administration is doing in the IRS?

Nathan Tankus  1:23:01 

Yes, it's -- well, we're going to start with the fundamentals. What are these systems? What are the IRS's COBOL systems? What do they do? What are they for? What kind of information are in them? But yeah, we're going to -- we're going to move forward to what the Trump administration is doing. And then, if the series is successful and keeps on going, then we'll get into trying to pull from current IRS sources and get into reporting, not to the same dramatic scale, but reporting like I was doing the first week of Bureau of Fiscal Service. But I'm looking to get into really expanding and start really putting out things.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:23:40 

Yeah, applying the same lens and diligence to --

Nathan Tankus  1:23:43 

To every agency. I mean, like, I -- you know, I want to -- my dream would be to get into, start doing this for national security stuff, and get into -- you know, I spent a couple days last year kind of randomly finding all the system of records that store information about foreign military sales, you know, the sale of military equipment and hardware from the federal government. Direct commercial sales, the sale of -- from the kind of licensed sale from the private sector and private companies, like Boeing or whatever, to foreign governments. And that's the thing that I would like to investigate, from the nuts and bolts system point of view, find current government sources and really map how these systems work. But obviously, you know, I don't have time to do that. I can't get into that.

But I'm at the point where, if I can get the funds, then I can get other people to do that, and I've got a lot of thoughts on how to approach that. And so now I'm really thinking about kind of wanting to investigate how just the entire federal government works, and how it's changing under the Trump administration. And to make a broader point, which I haven't really connected to that, like one of the constitutional issues here, which really gets to the nature of the state questions you were highlighting at the beginning of the interview, is that, despite the fact that there's the military industrial complex, despite the fact of an active genocide that has been run by the United States government for 19 months now, despite all of that, that there's been possibilities to build in life-making and for life-making institutions to still be in there, is that the federal government isn't this unitary thing, or going into the second Trump administration, it isn't this unitary thing.

That there are different government agencies, that there's Congress, which is different from the presidency, and that you could fight at your local level, state level, you can organize, and that -- and you have the legacy of organization from the past century plus, that had institutions that did life-making. And so that the federal government is this contradictory institution, because it has these death-making and life-making things in it, because it isn't unitary. It isn't one unitary entity. It's many different entities and conflicting priorities and cowardice and bravery and all of these contradictory things in it.

And for a long time, this has driven the far-Right of the United States, which is now just the Right, apoplectic. It enraged them for many, many decades. And especially the defeat of wanting to change this with -- when Nixon is kicked out and Congress takes much more of the reins of how the federal government operates and puts in all these protections, like it's no coincidence that the Privacy Act of 1974 gets passed in 1974, the year that Nixon resigns, because it's like look at all the ways that information, that data, that surveillance can be built out of the federal government, and we need to give people protections because look at what Nixon just did, and this must never happen again. There's a reason that all these laws are 1970s laws, in terms of privacy protections and so on. And the Right, it made their blood boil that the federal government is this contradictory thing.

And when they say bureaucrats, when they complain about bureaucrats, they don't mean the people pushing the buttons to kill Palestinians, because that's ultimately something that the President wants to do, whether the President is Biden or the president is Trump. What they mean is that a bureaucrat that can resist what the President wants, that Congress directs many of the things that operate, and ultimately the popular will can have an influence on Congress, however weak, and have an influence on how the wider society is structured.

And they've wanted to break it down, their aim to break it down was through this constitutional theory called the unitary executive theory. That's literally the name, and that's exactly what they mean. They mean that this institution is a unitary entity. And if it's unitary, then that means what it does is just what the President says, not ultimately what Congress says, although it has some little role, ultimately what the President says, goes. The president can't be held accountable to any law, and, you know, essentially, we elect a monarch every four years. That has been fundamentally the driving force of the far-Right, and now it's just called the Right, of the United States of America. And what they are doing, what they are doing with impoundment, what they are doing with all of this, is nothing less than putting the unitary executive theory into practice, in trying to break down the contradictory, differing features of the executive branch and making it purely the pure will of the president.

And by doing so -- and doing so requires demoting Congress, and that means it requires impoundment, because fundamentally why impoundment is unconstitutional is because it's abrogating Congress' role, Congress' control of the power of the purse, and for whatever else you can say about the founding fathers, they are absolutely correct that if the president can abrogate Congress' control of the power of the purse, then Congress is basically just an advisory body to an elected monarch. And that is nothing less than what we're talking about.

There is -- they can break the system and just kill us all, but beyond that, it is fundamentally breaking down the contradictions that make life-making possibly coexist with death-making and just making it an instrument of death, an instrument of fascism, an instrument of genocide, not just abroad, but domestically. And in that sense, abrogating all the laws that were abrogated in the Biden administration against congressional protections against us arming genocide was a fundamental prelude to the fundamental breaking down of the rest of the order. And this is the way in which, you know, there is, in many important, crucial respects, a smooth continuity from the Biden administration and what the Trump administration is doing now.

And yes, in some fundamental sense, what the Trump administration now is doing is worse, but it's worse in the sense of falling down a steep slope that the Biden administration already got us onto, and in some larger sense, we have been on for decades. And that means resistance to this system needs to embrace fighting impoundment, but not because, oh, we care about the constitution so much, but in this specific sense, unconstitutionality does not mean limiting democratic possibilities, unconstitutionality means just fully breaking down any possibility of life-making from the federal government, or just a lack of death-making, and genocide suffusing every institution and killing off anyone who isn't on board with their agenda.

And ultimately, killing themselves because they require many different life-making public goods for us to exist -- vaccines, you know, being a prime example. Basic functionality of Health and Human Services, all of -- you know, RFK Jr. being one of these people who exemplifies the expanse of death-making throughout the federal government, but it's going on everywhere. And if they win, if the impoundment crisis ends in their favor, and there's just fundamentally what gets spent is what the President says, then -- and if that gets to a point where it's not reversible, then we're at the end of the point of being able to find any way to exist in this society or make it better, and we have to start thinking about just fundamentally abandoning ship. 

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:31:53 

I think that's such an important point. And this is really why, in some sense, like a lot of people have been focused on the tariffs, but the bigger ball, the bigger thing that's more important to focus on is this internal payments crisis, right? Really, the idea of impoundments was something that was very clear, laid out as a goal in Project 2025, they've been talking about wanting to do it for a while.

[ Screen Reader Voiceover Introducing Clip ] 1:32:23 

June 20th, 2024.

[ Audio Clip — Donald Trump ]  1:32:26 

For 200 years under our system of government, it was undisputed that the President had the constitutional power to stop unnecessary spending through what is known as impoundment. On day one, I will order every federal agency to begin identifying large chunks of their budgets that can be saved through efficiencies and waste reduction using impoundment. Bringing back impoundment will give us a crucial tool with which to obliterate the deep state, drain the swamp and starve the warmongers, these people that want wars all over the place, killing, killing, killing, they love killing, and the globalists out of our government. We're going to get the warmongers and the globalists out of our government. With impoundment, we can simply choke off the money.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:33:17 

Just this specific administration that came in ready to try and make this happen, and the reason is because it does give them the control to, as you're saying, iron out these contradictions that they don't want. And they may not realize what they're doing, right, but that doesn't make what is going on any less death-making, right, and any less potentially destructive to the basic functioning of federal government, state governments, you know, the United States in general. And so one of the things that, as this crisis moves forward, we're now basically talking late February, early March, all this has been confirmed.

You start talking about how people can really understand when we might see these warning signs, of like how do we know the payments are being turned off, for example, from the end of February. And really, you talk about how, as the tariffs come in, you called it a Lehman Brothers moment in early April, referencing the 2008 recession (for those who are too young to remember the Lehman Brothers crash), but part of it is, you were trying to crash the stock market in the first place because it is this barometer to people in power, right? It's a kind of vibes meter, I think, as you've called it in the past, and really what we've seen since then are things like the reporting that is going on around people being declared dead by the Social Security Administration.

We've seen them gain access to all of this information that you were talking about, where they've got information that is being plugged into ICE in order to try and target people, the kind of crises that's ongoing, and this is part of why you want to expand the purview of Notes on the Crises, is that it's -- the Bureau of Fiscal Service is part of all these different branches and administrative agencies in different capacities, and it's part of how state, local and federal governments move in the United States, but it's also expanded into these other arenas, like IRS data becoming part of the Customs and Border Patrol and immigration policing system, right, in terms of targeting, right?

You have all these ways that the consequences of what they've been doing and the breakdown of the norms that allowed them to get in there, have resulted in a lot of the other harms that we're seeing pop up around the second Trump administration. So can we talk about what has happened through March now, to bring us to this point, or maybe through March and April, to set the stage for how this like -- this crisis isn't over. You know, Elez may have been fired and removed from this particular system, but this is definitely -- like Notes on the Crises is ramping up, because this is not something that like, oh, job done, they're not trying for impoundment anymore, we can all go home.

Nathan Tankus  1:36:17 

Yeah. So actually, to get to this part of the story, we still need to go back to early February [laughing], because a much less noticed thing that happened the same day that I put out my Odd Lots interview is that New York City received a grant, received some money from HUD to -- oh no, sorry, not from -- well, yes, from HUD -- from FEMA, within HUD, excuse me. So many darn institutions. And that money was to compensate New York City for some hotels, hotel rooms that New York City put up some Venezuelan refugees in. And they put them in because these people -- they needed to put up, or there was money to put these people up in hotels, because these people had been taken into custody, had been detained for being undocumented immigrants, and then released without the ability to work, ability to support themselves, while their asylum applications were being processed. And what that meant was they were either going to be homeless on the streets, which was a whole issue, when you get news cameras come around to see hundreds of people who were just homeless on the streets, or they could be put up. And so this money was to pay to put these people up, money that had been appropriated by Congress.

So Congress said that they're going to spend that money, and money that New York City had spent in advance of getting the money from the federal government, because that money was coming through, because that money had been passed through legislation, and they knew it was coming, even if it was going to take time. And so same day as I did that Odd Lots interview, they get some funds. They get all together basically like $100 million for that. But in the midst of the writing that I was doing in the second week of the Trump/Musk payments crisis, covering other developments, covering the legal cases, including legal case from a number of state attorney general offices that cited my reporting, this money was snatched back, quote, unquote, clawed back.

There was, in the technical terms, a payment reversal, and then there was a letter on the following day, citing New York Post reporting about how all these Venezuelan migrants were criminals in the hotel and doing crimes and ergo, it was illegal for this money to go out, the money that had already been sent out. So this had brought up -- for anyone who's a payments expert, and that's really a small circle of people, but really a payments expert, this was -- brought up immediate questions. And then especially for someone like me, who had been already covering what I'd been calling the Trump/Musk Treasury payments crisis, and seen them illegally do impoundment, the next step beyond impounding funds, of having funds not go out the door, is to say we're going to take funds back. And that's what they did, and they did it with no notice, which is extremely unusual.

And so for me and a very few other crew people, the immediate question is, okay, what are the actual constraints on them using the basic payment system that we all use, whether you really know, you might see it next to your check, see the acronym ACH, or you might have seen that acronym in your bank account when you received a payment, not really thought about or known about it, but this is the Automated Clearing House system. It's the fundamental system that payments that go out -- Social Security goes through ACH. If you get a direct deposit of Social Security or you get -- including SSDI, that's going to come from,through -- technically speaking, through the ACH system, from the Bureau of Fiscal Service to the Federal Reserve, through the banking system to your bank account.

But the technical communication system essentially that they're using, and literally the formatting and the files are determined by ACH, the Automated Clearing House. And there is a trade association that governs these payments, and it's the National Automated Clearing House Association, or NACHA. And so the immediate question came about that way, you know, so I shot an email off to the Comptroller's Office asking about it. Never really got a reply back. You know, I sent a follow-up message from Twitter. Nothing really came of it, and so I forgot about it, because obviously I've been very busy. I've been working 60-80 hours a week, but I started circling back on this towards the end of February, and really getting more, more into the details. And my instincts, my supposition, when I first heard the story, unfortunately bore out. And my instinct was, there's nothing they could do, that there's no protection against abusing the payment system.

And what I was -- what I was particularly concerned about is this payment -- that what had happened was technically called, in the technical language, a payment reversal, meaning the payment went out and you can kind of claim that there's an erroneous or duplicate process, and there's like a five-day business day window to reverse payments. And this already was an illegal use of it, because it's supposed to be like you sent a duplicate payment, or a payment was sent in error, not, oh, we don't think this payment should go out because we're deciding to impound it, but we didn't get in there fast enough to impound the payment, or we didn't notice it. That's not a real reason. So this already is illegal. But there's the bigger question, because at least with this, there's some fundamental connection with money going out and coming back. It is like impoundment plus, but it's still the realm of impoundment.

The other kind of even more dramatic idea is what if they could just start taking money out of any entity's bank account? What if they decide that they're going to identify all of George Soros' bank accounts and say, he has criminally done white genocide or whatever, and we're gonna -- we're going to make, we're going to make that billionaire penniless. And of course, they don't have access to all of his investment accounts, at least not necessarily. They got to go at it in different ways. But just with the ACH system, the question becomes, can they just empty every single bank account that they can identify George Soros has, or the Open Society Foundation, who, of course, previously have gotten grants.

So, Bureau of Fiscal Service systems have the Open Society Foundation's bank account. Can they just debit all of their bank account? And of course, with New York City, when they debited that account, even though they sent the money, the money was moved around and spent or used. You know, New York City has almost 5,000 bank accounts for various different complicated legal reasons, and it's almost 5,000 bank accounts. So when they sent a debit with no notice for $80.5 million to New York City's Central Treasury account, to its main bank account, that account only had like a million dollars in it, so it went to -79.5 million. And in fact, there's some question of whether -- you know, payments generally, if they are -- if they're going to overdraft an account, and especially that much, generally bounce.

And Citibank made the essentially executive decision to overdraft that account, and the account was overdrafted. It had been publicly reported and reported in legal documents that the account had a line of credit facility, and that kind of was the justification for just making New York City's account basically go to -70.5 million. Let's say it is not confirmed that there actually was such line of credit facility, and the details, the full details of what was going on in terms of what credit facilities, or lines of credit, that basically the ability to borrow money were or were not attached to New York City's bank account is as of yet unclear, and is the subject of further reporting, and that's kind of the closest I can really say to that.

But regardless of the kind of details of that, the big picture is -79.5 million dollars. Citibank charged like $22,000 in overdraft fees, which, after some public outcry, were generously waived by them. But fundamentally, we're talking, you know, at a certain level, there's the kind of at least it's attached to money that went out the door, but what if they just start debiting accounts? They just start saying -- or at the very least, just, you know, hey, we can come back 30 business days later, 100 business days later, 500 business days later, and go, ope, we're taking back that money. Hey, that money that New York City got in like 1967 as part of granted aid? Well, we're taking that back now. Like, what is the limitation, really?

And as I got into it, and started talking to sources, there's no limitation because the federal government essentially takes the legal prerogative to override the rules of the trade association, of NACHA, and they -- a lot of those rules are incorporated into how this works, basically just through the agencies, you know, the technical process called administrative agency rulemaking, where, when Congress's legislation isn't specific enough and doesn't tell you one way or another, the agencies sort of just come up with rules on their own. Well, the rules that they've come up with, and long-standing, that's not like Trump introduced it, it's just always been how it's been, is that basically, they're not subject to any check.

That the federal government can come up with its own rules overriding the system, and essentially, the limitation is supposed to be the federal government following the law as passed by Congress, and so on. And hey, you know, the federal government isn't just going to be randomly taking money out of bank accounts, because if it were any other bank, if they send out too many fraudulent payments -- and a debit, like basically subtracting money from a bank account, in the technical term, is a type of payment, so, like a negative is a payment. It's not just the positives that are payment.

The negatives, when money is subtracted out of your bank account, when you authorize your account to be debited to pay your credit card that month, that is a payment, even though, from your point of view, it's just money being taken out. It's a negative. And what that means, at its foundation, is they can just do whatever they want. And that was what my reporting was on. And I kind of did the real big picture, going back centuries, that like final payment, that you made a payment, and that the payment is final, is in some fundamental sense, that's what money is. Money is the object. It's the system by which you can make final payments, where the payment is done and someone has to enter into new legal proceedings if they want to have a dispute with you over some transaction that you've engaged in.

If I send you $100 and you go, hey, we got drinks, da da da da da, that I can't just go, you know, three months later, hey, actually, the drinks were no good, and also I hate you, and so I'm taking $100 back. That's not how it works. I have to sue, and I have to come up with the legal argument, and maybe the court's crooked, and goes in my favor, but nonetheless, I have to enter into a legal proceeding to get a court to say that you owe me $100 and then you have time. It's not like the money just automatically gets taken out of your bank account. You have time to pay me, and then you go through another court proceeding if you don't pay me. I mean, this is why -- this is why this system doesn't fundamentally break down all the time, is because it's a pain in the ass to go through all the processes you need to get paid with a new legal procedure. That's kind of -- and that's fundamentally what money is at a fundamental level, is the ability to make final payment. And this was really easy and obvious when money was physical cash, or arm's length money was physical cash. I hand you a coin, I hand you a dollar bill, I hand you a bank note, you know, and you can just walk away.

But now with money, with these accounts, when we have a bank account, when we have a Venmo account, when we have a PayPal account or Cashapp account, or all that stuff, there's this kind of concerning issue that should always be and kind of is at the back of your mind, what happens if the balance in my account is just lower? What happens if it just gets taken, you know? And what if happens if someone says, you know, we're taking that away? And what makes us confident into the -- you know, there's varied extents to which we have that confidence and, you know, if you are on the margins of the system, as I wrote about recently with say, sex workers, you know how fragile this can be, but nevertheless, the vast majority of the people, and certainly most institutions, rely on the fact that we have these kind legal niceties and really norms that make a payment is a payment is a payment, happen, and makes it true. That like -- and it's the system, it's the system of both trust and what we think are legal protections that make us believe that despite us having this account-based financial system, monetary system, that essentially that money still exists, that final payments exist.

And what the Trump administration is opening up now is the idea that that's just not true, that there is no such thing as final payment, that they can take money out of your bank account at any time, that there's no real protection against that, and they can come up with the justification, and they don't have to start a legal proceeding, which is, of course, already stacked in their favor, because they're the federal government, they can just say, hey, go take a payment. And this is where it comes, like, oh my god, you know, well, there must be some kind of protection within the federal government from this happening. And there is, you know, if you want to issue payments, if you want to issue especially a debit transaction, you got to get that certified.

But the problem is, you get that certified at the Bureau of Fiscal Service, which, again, is the thing which has been taken over by DOGE. And even if they don't have Marko Elez directly programming in there -- although there's some recent reporting I need to catch up on, because I've been doing so much, about another kind of like Marko Elez replacement finally in there -- but putting that aside, this other guy is now, who's now been given David Lebryk's job, or was given it a while ago, Thomas Krause is one of these DOGE people. And so, there's a DOGE guy who has the top job, means there's someone to order you and order those graybeard COBOL programmers to go change things, and --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:51:59 

Who have already made the decision of lesser of two evils to avoid it totally breaking, you know, complying with some of these requests.

Nathan Tankus  1:52:06 

Exactly. And so if that's the only thing keeping the federal government from issuing capricious debits, is just the Bureau of Fiscal Service certifying it, then unless we get information otherwise, we should think of that basically being done. A former -- I got -- in that story that I did, which also came out -- another, which was my second piece in Rolling Stone, one person just straightforwardly said to me, you know, who makes the decision to reverse probably just bows to the king. And he means, who makes the decision at BFS to reverse ACH payments probably just bows to the king, Trump, although I had to debate back and forth with my Rolling Stone editor whether my source meant the king being Trump or Musk, or somehow both [laughing]. And we just settled on Trump as the option. So, yeah, I mean, we're now at the situation, which is an ongoing situation, which I gotta get on and do more reporting on, of this fundamental issue of just them being able to randomly send debits.

And it took a lot of pressure from the Comptroller's Office, Brad Lander, to get New York City to actually sue in this case because, you know, then Brad Lander was in a position to pressure, despite being part of New York City, because the Comptroller's Office is an independently elected position, back to that importance of not having some entities of the government, in this case, the city government, just kind of unitarily ran by the whims of the executive, who in this case, the executive is the mayor, who is our favorite, Eric Adams. And the -- and not -- more than just Eric Adams, it's also just like who has the expertise really, to really understand what this fundamental legal issue is about, and the case wasn't focused on that, like the case wasn't focused on that issue. And in fact, something that I haven't written up, that I'm hoping to be able to have the time to write up this week, is that the case, New York City's lawsuit, has now been subsequently revised after my Rolling Stone piece, and I'll get into the details in that piece, but essentially, it seems that it's been basically completely rewritten based on my -- the legal memo that I commissioned --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:54:34 

Wow.

Nathan Tankus  1:54:35 

From a lawyer named Ashley Burke, about the ACH system and this legal issue, a nine page legal memo, and a brief, basically like the same way that you would in a government agency or at a white shoe law firm, and that I distributed for free, publicly, a PDF of it for free on my website, and it seems to have been just directly plugged in to revising New York City's lawsuit of the federal government. And this is a legal issue that affects every state and local government in the country, and at the same time, in a really dangerous situation where you have a lot of people who don't feel comfortable going to their legal counsel precisely because of the fear and the panic and the feeling that you're going to get snitched on to some higher up. If you're in the federal government, just be snitched to DOGE and to basically the White House. But even in other governments, especially a government -- like, you know, a unique government, which is a blue city government, but that we have a mayor who's fundamentally in hock to the Trump administration and the President because of the not quite dropping of the charges that are kind of hanging over him as like a sword of Damocles, like we're in a situation where a lot of people and a lot of different issues are going to want legal representation and want advice from their legal counsel, from their agency, whatever legal counsel, and don't feel like they can get it. And literally, like it's Notes on the Crises that can step into that void and start putting out memos for free.

And the thing -- and the powerful thing about putting memos out for free is, if you imagine all these different entities, even in different parts of the federal government, have their own legal counsel who write their own memos, but those memos don't get shared, so people are getting different legal advice of varying quality across the federal government. And that brings up the obvious issue, the question, the possibility that putting out legal opinions, or technically speaking, since they can't be construed as legal advice for legal purposes, legal research memorandum, is -- the fundamental thing that is powerful about that is it becomes the default opinion because it's what everyone references. If every one of those legal counsel examine that memo and obviously assuming quality, and I'm aiming for quality, and they know that everyone else has seen that memo, then it becomes the common reference point by which they all judge. This gives me an opportunity, a unique position, to define the conventional wisdom on previously quite obscure, sleepy legal issues that are now suddenly quite important, and that's something I can do as just like a publication that, as of three months ago, was just me and --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:57:31 

Just you.

Nathan Tankus  1:57:31 

And with an external monitor in my room, at my apartment.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  1:57:35 

Yeah, I mean, it really pulls back the curtain and gets at the heart of this kind of fantasy of competency that we talk about all the time on the show, being, I think, just a belief and an assumption that so many people have, that they've got a guy for that, that there's someone handling that, you know, that there is that expertise contained within these institutions, and that that is going to move forward regardless. And I think one thing that we've seen consistently throughout the Trump administration, which we're just coming on 100 days of the Trump administration, second Trump administration, is that the bleeding of that expertise has been one of the primary tools that they're using to gut each agency. We saw all of NIOSH dismissed basically this week. The only departments that didn't get dismissed is like the payments department and some of the World Trade Center Health Program people, even though that even got hit with cuts. But it's all of the Occupational Safety expertise that was contained within that department have all been cut loose, right? Like this is, when you see an N-95 mask, for example, you buy an N-95 mask, on the box it says NIOSH certified, right? Like they're the people setting the standards for what counts as an N-95 mask, right? So all of these different kind of levers of expertise, these ideas of respectability, these ideas of where checks and balances come out, to protect people in the wash of it all, are being pulled away in this moment through essentially the fact that money itself is becoming uncertain as a result of the tinkering that's going on in the Fiscal Service.

Nathan Tankus  1:59:25 

Yeah, absolutely. And we're starting to see that spiral out in these different government databases. Like you mentioned my reporting, which is my last piece, or my last piece as of this recording, from the Friday before last, which I titled "The Crisis At Social Security Illustrates Elon Musk and DOGE's Plan: Explode the Number and Severity of Improper Payments," that they're starting to do things in these systems, again, using that write access to a database to fundamentally destroy people's lives. And where this origin -- where my coverage of this originates is that weekend, a story came -- the weekend after my reporting at Rolling Stone, my second piece, an op-ed in the Seattle Times came out covering a guy who was listed as dead incorrectly and wasn't, and was listed that he died in October 2024, so he got his account debited for $5,201 and he didn't receive his February and March Social Security benefits. And now I've got the kind of credibility that people go, look, Nathan's reporting, it's already been confirmed. But I knew that Social Security was something different in this issue. And so I tweeted something that, no, this doesn't confirm my reporting. This is a different legal issue. And then I got to starting to work on it, but various other kind of back-end organizational issues took a while for me to get on it and get it fully together to the point that I was able to write about it. But one of the nice things is it meant that I got another memo, this time from an anonymous lawyer on this issue, on the the way the Automated Clearing House system, the ACH system interacts with Social Security precisely about this issue. And this is, again, an issue of a lack of payment finality, but it's a lack of payment finality that basically has been a long standing issue in Social Security.

And so to back up, to get the basics is -- I'm working on a more popular op-ed based on my kind of technical piece, and my starting point with that op-ed is, how do you know you're not dead? Bea, how do you know you're not dead?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  2:01:42 

Because my SSDI payments come through.

Nathan Tankus  2:01:45 

Because your -- yeah, I mean, and that's a weird answer, because some of your audience is going to be like, what do you mean? You're not dead because you're talking, like you're having a conversation where you're not dead, but what you understood exactly, what I -- where I was going with that, which is, there is the question of you being alive as a physical person, and then there's the question, there's some question of you being alive as a social person, but then there's the question about your legal life.

The way I've referenced it in the piece I'm working on is, you know, in monarchies, in the philosophy of monarchy, if you like, it's said, especially in the Anglo tradition, that the king has two bodies, or that the sovereign has two bodies. And one of those bodies is their physical person, and the other body is like sovereign, is being a kind, is the abstract concept that they're King, and that there is a king. And essentially, we all have two bodies as well in that sense. We have our legal existence, and we have that we actually physically exist. And one can die without the other. You can physically die, but you haven't legally died, because no one has any evidence you've died, and you haven't been declared dead by any sort of institution. And so your legal existence is still there, but you're dead. And on the flip side, though, is you can legally die while still being alive, while being able to get up in the morning and drink coffee. And in our society, in our system, one of the most important institutions for various reasons, in terms of whether you're alive or dead is whether Social Security says you're alive or dead.

And technically speaking, that's the matter of a COBOL system, and specifically a certain file called the Death Master File, the DMF. And if you're put on the Death Master File, and that information gets communicated out, then you're dead. Then, if they say, Nathan Tankus is dead, Nathan Tankus is dead. You know, they start closing up my bank account. Now my estate has to process the ownership of Notes on the Crises, Inc. All sorts of things come crashing down if they declare me dead, and just as it's true with anyone else. And this is a COBOL system.

And so if you're either someone like me, who's trying to figure out what this kind of person would do and how they'll abuse the system, or you're this type of person who's licking their chops and going, ah, what can I do to really destroy people's lives and make the world worse with my access to the system, or just accomplish my goals, the obvious question is, what's to stop my political -- you know, screwing with my political enemies by declaring them dead, by moving them to the Death Master File. It's sort of like a simplistic idea, oh, you're just going to kill people arbitrarily by moving them to the Death Master File, okay. And so when I started looking at this, that weekend even, you know, March 15, but further on, I was just like, yeah, this is a huge danger of direct operational access of the system is to just be able to kill people.

If I'm recalling correctly, the reporting at that time was Marko Elez was head Social Security around that time, and so it's Marko Elez. What is he going to do with that system? And so I started immediately thinking about, what are the implications of putting someone on the Death Master File? I keep on going back to that Soros example, you start declaring Soros dead, then his estate needs to be processed and all of that. And, you know, things start legally crashing around him. What happens to his board seat now that he is dead? And he can be kind of frozen out of control of his own institutions just on the basis of him being dead. It's not because we care so much about Soros as a billionaire, we just mean like who are major influential people who are considered enemies of the Trump administration, that you could start just screwing with their lives about. But then there's also more fundamental questions about being able to screw with a massive amount of people.

And by the time I got around to writing about this, major things had already started happening. So one of the major things which then get kind of submerged or blown way past was that 3,600 immigrants who had Social Security Numbers, whether they're like permanent residents or whatever, were moved to the Death Master File, basically under like the idea that the legal pressure of being declared dead by the United States Government, completely arbitrarily, explicitly arbitrarily, for the purpose of making these people, quote unquote, self deport, that basically legally existing in the United States would become impossible because they've been declared dead, and as a result, they -- you know, you better just leave and go back to where you came from. And that's already extraordinary, but then an even bigger thing happened, which -- I mean, it almost beggars belief to talk about, but according to reporting at The Daily Beast, they [laughing] -- I don't even -- I haven't had to say this out loud. It's preposterous to even say. They moved four million people to the Death Master File. More than 1% of the United States population, they moved to the Death Master File, according to The Daily Beast's reporting.

And it's unclear, but it seems quite possible that that was all Social Security beneficiaries. I mean, it's not confirmed, much more reporting needs to be done, including by myself. But for if four million people, if all four million were Social Security beneficiaries, that would be nearly 5.6% of all Social Security beneficiaries. I mean, we're talking about a scale that is mind boggling, and even more fundamentally, the way -- again, getting back to this question of payment finality.

And I didn't really -- you know, besides all these other things that can happen to you, this, -- the way Social Security Act is written, they can, quote unquote, reclaim Social Security benefits, basically whenever, and take the money without -- directly from your bank account, without any due process. And so you've been wrongly declared dead by DOGE, and then your bank account gets debited for $10,000. And then even getting beyond the fact that they start freezing and closing down bank accounts for people who are seen as dead and all this other stuff, even if you have a joint account, you get -- the money just gets directly sucked out of your account, which can end up being quite a lot if, for example, they decide that they declared that you died in 2005 or something, you know, they declare that you died in 2005 or 2010, 2015, that means debiting your account for all those Social Security benefits.

You know, that could be literally potentially sending a debit to your account for $100,000, a million, or something like that. But even just -- you don't need to do that much to make someone's life unlivable. It can be, quote unquote, just $5,000 and not receiving your Social Security benefit is plenty to kill a lot of people. And at the same time, they are -- and this is where the idea of the improper payments, getting back to the impoundment crisis is, this has always been a problem, but it hasn't been in Social Security.

But this kind of lack of payment finality issue hasn't been a huge issue because Social Security has had a bureaucracy that you could go fix it. Regional offices, you know, the bureaucracy was there that kind of made the lack of payment finality a small issue. And now you have a time where they're exploding the errors, or just outright committing fraud on the government side against people, while at the same time gutting and closing down regional offices and firing 30% of the staff, so that you've limited the ability to fix the problems that you're now exploding.

Then what we're talking about is an absolute explosion in impoundment, because this is essentially a -- this is like a kind of convoluted database, you know, interaction of technical systems way of generating impoundment, rather than just saying, ah, we're just not going to send the files. But fundamentally, it's also just about increasing these improper payments, because not sending payments, not getting money, is an improper payment. It's not just someone getting money that they, quote, unquote, shouldn't have that's an improper payment, not -- you know, underpayments are improper payments, too.

And they've jury-rigged the system to, despite what they say, explode improper payments and explode the severity. Because even when we've had improper payments, these tend to be -- situations often get fixed. Money gets -- money gets reversed, so on. These are problems that are not getting fixed, which makes them much more severe, quote, unquote, improper payments. And so, it's the -- you know, the reality is exactly the reverse of what Elon Musk and DOGE and the Trump administration say is, they're not cracking down on waste, fraud and abuse.

They're creating waste, fraud and abuse, you know, emphasis on the abuse, for their own purposes, and what they really mean when they say improper payment is they mean disfavored payment. It's an institution they don't like, and other people are getting money that they do like, and it's just a pure, kind of raw expression of their own preferences. And so, yeah, I wrote -- I got another legal memo written on this, which will, I think, also become the definitive statement on this issue. And things are only getting worse. I don't know what the current state is, and need to get back into it, but there was reporting out of Wired about them wanting to try to get off of COBOL at Social Security within two to three months, which is atrocious and opens back up the idea of systems just breaking. And if they break the system, even -- forget Bureau of Fiscal Service, if they just break Social Security's system, that's just Social Security benefits going out. And that's an open question of how much this -- how much this society could survive, quote, unquote, just Social Security payments not going out, let alone everything else.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  2:12:44 

Yeah, it's staggering, you know, it really is. And I know a lot of people listening, a lot of our listeners are on benefits or care for people who are on benefits. And I know that a lot of people are just living with the day-to-day anxiety of like, what happens if my SSDI or my SSI doesn't show up? What happens if my state kicks me off of Medicaid because it can't pay for Medicaid anymore, you know? What happens if the clinic I'm relying on that is a rural hospital or something, you know, like that relies on payments to stay open, closes, and I don't have access to an emergency room that's any closer than four hours' drive away. I wonder if you have anything that you want to sort of say directly to folks who are scared right now, who see this happening and who worry about experiencing personal clawbacks and these kind of system level effects that we've been talking about at a broad material scope, like how you might want to address the kind of minute, very personal concerns of how this could materially impact people, just on a one to one level.

Nathan Tankus  2:14:00 

I think first of all, I would just say, and this is kind of extremely cheesy, but it's also true, that regardless of what happens, it's not your fault. And it's worth saying that, even though it's so obvious, first of all, to some people it's not going to be obvious, but also, because all the messages in this society go the other way, that tell you that everything is your fault, the fact that you're even on SSDI or SSI is your fault. That, fundamentally, this isn't your fault. You need support. You need help. That's the inherent nature of society. I've needed support. I've needed help. I wouldn't have gotten here to this point without all sorts of different kinds of help, big and small. And you need help, you deserve help, and it's -- you know, as my people like to say, you know, it's a shanda that you don't get sufficient help, and that the help that you do get will be taken away. And so that's the first, fundamental thing I'd like to say.

And the second thing is, you know, we're in a moment where a lot of people are realizing that it's not just you, that it's not just sex workers who are subject to a lack of payment finality, that money can just be taken out of bank accounts, frozen accounts, that it's all of us. We're all the "them," and that means that, in a weird way, you're not alone, because, hey, people on regular Social Security are now experiencing a lot of the frustrations and difficulties that you experience, and at a broader, more fundamental level, everyone is subject to that. You know, you're affected if you live in New York City, and the money just gets taken right out of New York City's bank account, or they stop getting federal grants. This your state. It's everywhere. It's all of us. And a lot of people, one way or another, are going to have to confront that. And the Trump administration -- Trump was already historically unpopular, his popularity is cratering even more. The tariff stuff is not going to help at all, and is going to keep on going. And this country has never been more ripe for organizing around these issues. And there's efforts, efforts I know about that haven't been public yet that will be distributing educational material, things that you can hand out and protest.

And I think, you know, a lot of it is just the same thing that's always said, but it's the same thing that's more important than ever, of getting organized, getting connected to your community. And at some level, we kind of just have to have a certain degree of faith, which doesn't mean it's guaranteed to happen, but like a faith that some processes are in the works that will have a blowback, that will get organized, and if you personally can't get organized, that other people will be getting organized as well. And as this process builds out, because it's going to affect us all, and it's never been more clear that we're all subject to these kinds of constraints and these kinds of cracks and these kinds of decaying of our institutions, that there's an opportunity, not a guarantee, but an opportunity of pulling back at least some of the othering that makes you feel fundamentally isolated and unsafe around other people, that we can -- we can take a crack at eroding those things.

And that there's a lot of people who are very angry and may have the ability, through no virtue of their own, to take on the way to fighting this. And hell, you know, not to pat myself on the back too much or anything, but I'm one of those people, and I'm finding a way to resource a lot of these other people to take this on. And clearly, in a moment where Paul Krugman feels like he needs to interview me twice in a couple months and --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  2:18:06 

Yeah, yeah.

Nathan Tankus  2:18:07 

You know, who knows the end of that, and all these other institutions that are -- that are coming to me, clearly, there's a moment where very few people have ideas, and I'm in a unique position to fill that void. And it's an amazing thing to be both a friend of Death Panel and also be able to kind of define the public sphere and define what the public reaction to a lot of these things are, and to be able to step into a void that maybe, say, a couple of years ago might have been represented by Matt Yglesias or Ezra Klein, or any of these kinds of people, or God forbid, Noah Smith. And [Bea laughing, groans] you know, take a take an opportunity to feed in to different things, and that's part of what I've intentionally tried to do with my writing lately.

Like, you know, there's a reason I had a full paragraph on sex workers and the conversations about payment finality I've had with sex workers in an article on Social Security, trying to get people to identify themselves with these other people. Because now, if you weren't, if you didn't believe it before, you can kind of see the point now that what you let get done to undocumented immigrants, what you let get done to sex workers, what you let get done to people on SSDI, becomes what is able to be done with you. And the only option coming out of this, coming out of the attempt to fully make the unitary executive a reality, is to build a system that will give people the security that they've never had from these systems and get rid of a whole bunch of surveillance systems that are clearly subject to enormous abuse.

There's just data that we should not be collecting on people, because if the wrong person gets access to that data, then a lot of people are in a world of pain. And we've built -- we can get into this another time, because it's going to take a lot more writing and reporting to get into this, but many of these surveillance systems, many of these databases that have been built, have been built to surveil primarily poor people, the marginalized, for the purpose of scraping up a few pennies under the idea that like, oh, we gotta protect taxpayers' money, that these groups of people uniquely abuse, and it's arguing over peanuts. And, it's one thing to say, oh, these systems don't save much money, or even don't save money, and it's another thing to -- and make our society worse and hurt people. It's another thing to say, yeah, they don't do much of anything, and then also, on top of that, our society might collapse because, you know, a 1/3 of it is declared dead, or a Gestapo is given information on any immigrant, undocumented or documented, or anyone who can just be declared an illegal immigrant violating the law and sent to a death camp in El Salvador.

And clearly, if we're going to get past this, if any semblance of American democracy survives, we are going to have to knock down the whole edifice that the Trump administration and various supporters, both Democrat and Republican, of the imperial presidency, have built up for half a century and rebuild something entirely new in its place. I mean, and I'm talking even -- you know, even from sort of a basic position of liberal principles of the mid 20th century, let alone like leftist politics.

And we're going to need fundamental, fundamental changes, regardless of whether you want to say revolution or reform or anything else, it's going to be real fundamental and root and branch. It has to be, because there is no compromising with a mass death-making or potentially death-making surveillance apparatus anymore.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  2:22:23 

Right. Yeah. And I mean, and what does that even mean for capitalism when money -- for American capitalism, when money becomes uncertain.

Nathan Tankus  2:22:31 

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  2:22:32 

You know, and that's -- it's okay to not know what to do, because this is not -- there's no playbook for any moment that we're in, history is not bound to repeat itself, you know? But there are -- I think also I would encourage people, if you do experience the precarity, even if just like worrying about your benefits not showing up, talk to anyone you can about it. There is a whole psychological burden that's placed on beneficiaries that people don't even realize people go through, of just living under the surveillance of SSI, for example, of Medicaid, of constantly reasserting that you're disabled when you're an SSI recipient. That kind of continual surveillance, like these are the things that no one talks about or wants to hear about, and you have embodied expertise that right now is really crucial. And I -- Nathan, I really appreciate you taking so much time today to walk through this story, which is just a drop in the bucket of really the broader picture. But again, it's like, it really -- I think this conversation really pulls back the curtain on something that most people never see. I know I already said that, but I think it bears repeating. And I think, you know, now that the curtain's pulled back, I'm curious, what are you watching for, and where do you think things are -- what are you looking for moving forward?

Nathan Tankus  2:24:03 

I'm looking at the financial stresses and how -- the extent to which, especially as we get to the point of actually having empty shelves, the way in which that will potentially shift the ruling class more against Trump, while at the same time, I'm looking to trace out more payments issues. I'm looking to see just how extensive impoundment is hitting state and local governments, the extent to which state and local governments aren't just not openly saying it, the extent to which payments have been reversed elsewhere, but people haven't been openly talking about this, sort of tracing that out. As I said, I've got an IRS investigation going. I'm going to get more into COBOL systems in other areas besides the Treasury. And you know, it's kind of very open-ended, because it all depends on the resources I can get, how quickly that can happen, but it could potentially be lots of different institutions. And I want to get a more comprehensive picture of what is happening with all the various different COBOL systems and DOGE. So, that is where I'm at right now. And, at the same time, I've got other things that I can't talk about, and let's just say, other ways -- there's multiple ways to expand. There's organic growth, and there's acquisitions. And, I am -- I am looking at some potential acquisitions right now.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  2:25:40 

Exciting things at Notes on the Crises.

Nathan Tankus  2:25:42 

Yeah. And there's no Lina Khan there to stop me.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  2:25:45 

[laughing] Yeah. Oh, hell yeah. Well, before we wrap, is there anything you want to leave listeners with, any points you want to just re-emphasize at the end before we wrap?

Nathan Tankus  2:25:57 

No, I think at this point I would just say, go to crisesnotes.com/deathpanel to get a $27.50 annual subscription, you know, which comes out to just about $2.30 a month. And you know, I'm going to be delivering more and more and more and more content at a lower and lower price point as this becomes -- as you get those economies of scale, where this is no longer just the Nathan Tankus Show and what Nathan Tankus randomly decides to hammer on, but becomes more a full-fledged publication, or it becomes more of a full-fledged publication, and my role becomes more President, Editor in Chief, and less my own writing, which, of course, I will continue to do and try to keep up with as much as possible. But I'm at the phase now where I'm looking to have a full-fledged publication, you know, audio, video, streaming, writing, other writers. I've got a 2,000 square foot office that I'm scheming and plotting out of, and which just accelerates the connections and the possibilities for moving forward, and fundamentally changing things and doing -- getting other people a space where they can research and think deeply about ideas, where there's just is no place to go. I can't -- for various reasons. I can't make it an open, open office. But if you have reason to think that like you're a friend or friends of friends, you can reach out to me over email, maybe even Signal. And you know, with people that I know I can trust, to say, not take pictures out the windows andpost them online that can identify where my office is, I'm otherwise having a pretty open door policy. As long as I can feel like I can trust you, you know, to treat things that are going on in this office is off the record, unless said otherwise, and to not identify the office in public. So, there's enormous, enormous opportunity, especially at the intersection of a whole set of issues that are wildly under covered and could not be more important, especially now.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  2:28:25 

Well, lots of exciting things to come. I can't wait.

Nathan Tankus  2:28:28 

Absolutely.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton  2:28:28 

And I think that's a great place to leave it for today. Nathan, thank you so much. Really appreciate you taking the time to walk us through this and for doing the reporting in the first place. It's exhausting work, but what it makes so clear, I think, for a lot of people, is that what we're living through right now is the deliberate sabotage of the administrative state, and the kind of reliability of the administrative state that many people took for granted has been really laid bare.

And this is about reshaping who gets to live, who gets to die, and who is sort of disappeared through administrative processes and system quirks. This is about, I think, the silent, messy machinery also that keeps people fed, housed, insured, even if they're just barely afloat, and how that's being weaponized right now and rerouted.

And I think it's really important to understand how all these pieces work, regardless of where your opinion falls on working within the state or against it, it's really crucial to understand actually what we're talking about when we talk about the state. And I think your work really excellently offers so much insight to that. So it's absolutely vital, and it's always great to have you on the show, but I really appreciate you also helping us cover what happened while we were out too.

As an independent media project, it's only by the grace and support of the people who are patrons of Death Panel that Artie and I were even able to take any time off to recover from having a baby and get used to having a baby in our lives. And I so appreciate all the detail that you went into today, and thank you so much, Nathan.

And patrons, thank you. Your support truly makes this show possible. We couldn't do any of this without you. If you value our work and you want to help keep the project going, become a patron. We rely on listeners like you to sustain the show.

Join at Patreon.com/DeathPanelPod and get access to weekly bonus episodes and our full back catalog with hundreds of hours of bonus content. And to help us out some more, post about your favorite episodes, pick up copies of Health Communism, A Short History of Trans Misogyny, and Abolish Rent at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, hold reading or discussion groups, share the show with someone who needs to hear it, and of course, you can also follow us @DeathPanel_.

Patrons, we'll catch you later in the week in the main feed. As always, Medicare For All Now. Solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.

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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)