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Payments crisis of 2025: Not “read only” access anymore

If you are a current or former career Bureau of the Fiscal Service Employee, especially if you’re a legacy IT programmer with years of experience and especially if you are a COBOL programmer currently working on the PAM, SPS or any other adjacent team, contact me over email or

As readers are certainly aware by now, yesterday I released a bombshell article laying out the crisis that emerged on Friday with Musk and his “DOGE” trying to get operational access and control. Since I published my article at 6 am yesterday morning, a number of current and former Bureau of the Fiscal Service officials have reached out and unfortunately confirmed the accuracy of my reporting. This is what I meant yesterday when I referenced that 30 different COBOL systems at Treasury had developed their own “dialects” and they launched Payment Application Modernization (PAM), which among other things, unified them.

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