This is edition 2025/21 of the Ten@10 newsletter.
Welcome back. It's 2025 and 20 years since I started writing about politics and anything else that took my fancy. Thank to my VIP members for making this site what it is today. In July we will be having a 20th birthday celebration. Stay tuned for more announcements.
This is the Ten@10, where I collate and summarise ten news items you generally won't see in the mainstream media.
Enjoy!
1. The Machine Fights Back
EKO
- 💸 Simple things were left blank: Payment categories
- 🕵️♂️ Payment rationales
- 📊 Basic audit controls
- 💼 The kind of fields any small business would require.
- 📉 The kind that let you track where money goes.
- 🚫 The kind that stop a billion dollars of fraud. Every week.
- 🕵️♂️ Here's what Treasury didn't want exposed:
- 💰 Over $100 billion flowing annually to accounts without Social Security numbers.
- 🆔 No temporary ID numbers. No verification. Nothing.
- 🕳️ When Musk asked Treasury officials how much was "unequivocal and obvious fraud," the answer revealed decades of corruption: HALFLet that sink in.
- 💸 $50 billion per YEAR. A billion dollars every SINGLE week disappearing into accounts that shouldn't exist.
- 🏦 The kind of fraud that would shut down any bank in America.
- ⚖️ The kind that would land any business owner in federal prison.
- 🏛️ But Treasury had perfected its system:
- 🔄 Process payments
- 🙈 Ignore controls
- 🔄 Keep the machine running
- 🚔 Yesterday, something shifted.
- 🛡️ A judge's order appeared, ex parte—meaning only one side could speak.
- 🚫 No warning. No defense allowed. Just a wall erected between Treasury officials and their own department's data.
- 🔍 Look at the numbers. Really look at them.
- 💸 Treasury bleeds 23.87% of its budget to waste, fraud, and abuse.
- 📉 Almost a quarter, vanishing into what auditors politely call "mismanagement."
- 👥 More than Labor at 11%. More than Veterans Affairs at 10%. More than Agriculture at 9%.
- 🛡️ More than Defense Department's 1.85%. More than Homeland Security's 0.89%.
- 🔍 A pattern emerges.
- 🕵️♂️ The deeper you go into Treasury's operations, the more the waste grows.
- 🕵️♂️ The more controls vanish.
- 🕵️♂️ The more fraud flourishes.
- 🚫 Until now.
- 🗣️ "Everything at Treasury was geared towards complaint minimization,"
- 🕵️♂️ Musk revealed after meeting with officials.
- 📉 Not accuracy. Not accountability. Not protecting taxpayer dollars.
- 🔄 Just keeping the machine quiet.
- 🕵️♂️ This wasn't incompetence.
- 📉 This was design.
- 🕵️♂️ Previous management had built a perfect system:
- 💸 Let the fraudsters complain. Let them threaten. Let them pressure.
- 🔄 Easier to process bad payments than face their wrath.
- 💭 Think about that calculation.
- 💸 A billion dollars of fraud every week was deemed less costly than dealing with complaints from people gaming the system.
- 🛡️ That's how machines like this protect themselves.
- 🔄 Not through efficiency. Not through good management.
- 🕳️ But through the path of least resistance.
- 📉 Through empty fields. Missing controls. Payments without social security numbers.
- 💸 Through a quarter of their budget disappearing into the void.
- 🔍 Until someone starts asking where it goes.
- 🛡️ The system's response was swift. Coordinated. Precise.
- 📝 Nineteen Democratic state attorneys general filed suit.
- 🚫 Not about the fraud. Not about the waste.
- 📉 Not about billions vanishing into accounts without SSNs.
- 🏛️ But about "protecting" the Treasury Department from its own Secretary.
- 🛡️ A judge in New York responded with something unprecedented:
- 🚫 An ex parte order blocking Treasury officials from accessing their own department's data.
- 🚨 No warning. No chance to respond. No opportunity to present evidence.
- 🧱 Just a wall between the people elected to fix the system and the system itself.
- 💭 Think about what that means:
- 💼 The Secretary of the Treasury—effectively the CFO of the United States government—legally barred from seeing how money moves through his own department.
- 🗳️ The people's appointee blocked from viewing the people's accounts.
- 💻 Young coders mapping the missing controls ordered to stop looking.
- 🤖 The MACHINE (that’s what I’ll be calling the DS from now on) has judges.
- 🏛️ Has lawyers. Has media. Has entire states moving in coordination.
- 🌞 But here's what makes this time different:
- 💰 The DOGE clock keeps ticking. $74 billion saved and counting.
- 🕳️ Each number representing not just dollars, but holes in the machine.
- 🛡️ Gaps in the armor. Places where light gets in.
- 🛡️ They can file motions. Can issue orders. Can build blockades.
- 🚫 But they can't make those empty fields disappear.
- 🕳️ Can't hide a quarter of Treasury's budget vanishing into the void.
- 🛡️ Can't stop what happens when people finally see truth.
- 🔍 This isn't about spreadsheets anymore.
- 🔍 This isn't about waste or controls or management.
- 💼 This is about who controls the machine.
- 💭 Because when you find something like empty fields in Treasury's payment system,
- 📊 You're not just finding missing data.
- 🏛️ You're finding purpose.
- 💸 When basic controls sit blank while billions vanish weekly,
- 🕵️♂️ That's not incompetence.
- 📉 That's design.
- 🤖 The machine is fighting back.
- 🌞 But this time, it's fighting years and years and years of gathered light.
- 💡 Now activated.
- 🌞 And summer is coming.
