A federal judge’s decision to bar Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from reviewing the Treasury Department’s payment system is most likely a temporary setback — but it illustrates the urgent need to secure a permanent win for transparency.
Progressives are panicking because their 100-year, largely successful assault on American constitutional government is in danger of being reversed.
Thanks to Musk’s wise plan to follow the money, he has a historic opportunity to mount a coup — not on behalf of himself or President Trump, but for We the People.
But to make the revolution stick, he’ll have to make transparency a permanent feature of our federal government.
He can do it with a simple tool allowing individual Americans to view the Treasury payment system in real time.
Call it “America’s Checkbook.”
Our nonprofit organization, Open the Books, is ready to help.
Our concept is based on a fundamental belief that the money the Treasury spends is the property of American taxpayers.
Those funds belong to We the People, not to any branch of government — and certainly not to an unelected administrative state.
Individual Americans have the same right to review “America’s Checkbook” as they do their own personal accounts.
Why not allow taxpayers to set up their own “fraud alerts” or “low balance alerts,” flagging them when their money goes to a purpose that they find objectionable?
Let taxpayers see their money flows — every dime, online, in real time — to infrastructure projects, cancer research, life-saving humanitarian assistance . . . and drag shows in Ecuador.
Then trust them to demand of their legislators more or less of each.
To be clear, Musk and his DOGE recruits only had “read-only” access to the payment system.
Despite all the leftist caterwauling, when Musk regains access he won’t be able to cut off Social Security payments to “enemies” or siphon off funds to Tesla or Space X.
Giving taxpayers that same “read-only” access through “America’s Checkbook” will be no less revolutionary.
Our founders wrote transparency into the Constitution, but my confidence in it is not merely theoretical: I’ve seen it work in the arena.
Transparency cuts through government like water cuts through stone. When it finds cracks, it can wash away mighty walls of opposition and create sudden and dramatic change.
When I worked with the late US Sen. Tom Coburn, we partnered with then-Sen. Barack Obama on a landmark transparency bill that put all federal spending online for the first time.
The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 created USASpending.gov, with the goal of forming an ecosystem of citizen activists and organizations who would impose permanent downward pressure on spending.
Our strategy worked — and continues to do so.
Greater transparency helped Coburn and Tea Party allies in Congress secure a 10-year moratorium on congressional earmarks starting in 2011, and in 2012 achieve the first year-to-year reduction in federal spending since the end of the Korean War.
Data and citizen-led accountability helped us overcome the objections of both progressives and big-spending Republican “earmarxists” to save taxpayers more than $100 billion.
But the USASpending.gov website only gets us partway to full, real-time transparency.
It collects information on government contracts and grants, letting users see in broad strokes the spending decisions of the past.
But its data is partial and lags outlays by 30 days or even longer.
In today’s information environment, speed and accuracy are essential for a reality-based spending debate.
The payment system is where the sausage truly gets made as the government’s proverbial checks are cut to vendors and individuals.
“America’s Checkbook” would make it easier to detect when improper payments are made — and the ability to call out waste, fraud and abuse in real time would be a uniquely powerful tool that any citizen could use.
President Trump has given DOGE an 18-month mission, but whatever its result, the accountability project he has started will be required in perpetuity.
Creating “America’s Checkbook” now will put immense political pressure on future administrations: Any efforts to switch it off would effectively debank us.
Once we open the federal books, it will be near impossible to shut them again.
This is a 1989 moment for America: We have an opportunity to tear down the bureaucratic wall that has separated We the People from our government.
As George Will has put it, we’ve been living through a 100-year constitutional crisis courtesy of know-it-all progressives who created an administrative state to save us from ourselves.
Crowd-sourcing oversight will shift the balance of power away from the bureaucracy and back to individuals.
“America’s Checkbook” will give citizens a megaphone and silence critics.
It will prove our leaders’ confidence in the wisdom of We the People, our system of checks and balances and the genius of America’s founders.
John Hart is the chief executive officer of Open the Books and the former communications director for US Sen. Tom Coburn.
