TPM: Rampin' Up, Baby! That Thiel Start Up Hunting the Motherlode Contract is Inside Treasury

[demmiblue]

One of the most important stories in some time came out two days ago. But with so much else going it didn’t get quite as much attention as it should have. It’s from ProPublica. And it’s about a Peter Thiel-backed start up called Ramp. It’s a corporate credit card processing outfit. The game here is pretty straightforward. Trump and Musk are looking to hand some or all of the government’s $700 billion internal expense card program (SmartPay) over to Ramp. A bunch of the meetings were organized by Josh Gruenbaum, a private equity guy who Trump and Musk installed as chief acquisitions officer at the GSA. (He was also the lead signatory on the demand letter to Harvard we’re now told, as of last night, was accidentally sent. So Gruenbaum’s got a lot going on.) Ramp’s value add is supposed to be the use of AI to monitor spending.

The overall picture is a standard one: Come in, take over the data and financial architecture; discredit it by having your media arms dish out mountains of phony stories about fraud and abuse; fire all the employees and hand a cash-drenched, sweetheart contract to yours and your friends company.

Or maybe it’s a start up, which has already raised about $2 billion from the likes of Peter Thiel and the Kushner family, among others, and thus needs a pretty big exit. It all comes together quite nicely. It’s good to be the king, as Mel Brooks once put it. And I suspect that’s just a prelude to a vastly bigger prize: contracts to manage payments of the more than $1.5 trillion that goes to Social Security recipients and likely other government programs that disperse money directly to individuals.

Now, yesterday I heard that a new DOGEr, named Roland Tenglong Shen, showed up (remotely) at the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service (BFS) and was hastily granted access to the Bureau’s systems. (Way faster than normal onboarding rules allow.) The focus of his access appears to be something called the Payment Analytics Cloud Environment (PACE) which is itself part of Disbursement And Debt Management Analytics Platform (DDMAP). I’m told it all came together very fast yesterday. At first I thought this might have something to do with DOGE’s new “Defend the Spend” program, which I mentioned last night and was discussed in an article in the Post. The timing seemed to come together very nicely.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/rampin-up-baby-that-thiel-start-up-hunting-the-motherlode-contract-is-inside-treasury

[Kid Berwyn]

1. Bellhop is itchin' to bring up 25th Amendment real soon.

At its essence, Project 2025 basically institutes fascism for a feudalism for the A.I. Roboto Age: socialization of risk to the People and direct transfer payments in the form more welfare for the wealthy. Once Trump and his cohort are gone or in jail, the real piratization can begin as super-pee-resident Shady Couchhumper does what Techbro Thiel says and sells off public assets for pennies on the dollar to the connected and only wealthy connected friends-and-fiends-n-family.

[delisen]

2. Fake No Risk Capitalism. Steal from the people by being gifted lucrative govt contracts

Contacts we do not want, need , and which we cannot afford.

First of course get corrupt persons into high offices.

[BoRaGard]

3. G.O.P. grifters out to rob America

and the G.O.P. weakly letting them do it

[dweller]

4. Someone trustworthy needs

To be keeping an eye on the SS funds … what goes in and what goes out.

✌🏻

[erronis]

9. Not sure that anyone trustworthy would be allowed to monitor the transactions.

Normally an IG type position would be a good place but those have all been fired and/or replaced with ass-kissers.

Also, is anyone monitoring the federal gold reserves? I hear there's someone with a fetish for gold...

[Irish_Dem]

5. Billionaires dividing up all American assets and resources.

Fascists dividing up the world's countries and resources.

Greatest heist in world history.

[CousinIT]

6. ALL of the gov't is being privatized to Musk and his friends (Thiel is one of them)

Once that's done it is not easily UNdone.

We will get ENSHITTIFIED, fraud and corruption-ridden services at TEN TIMES the cost to US taxpayers.

[KPN]

8. Well, easily undone with, say, guillotines.

[peacebuzzard]

7. this is the cash out wet dream

for these PayPal guys. At $5.00 or more for deposits direct to accounts, bank fees etc...the poor folks without bank accounts will suffer the most and those with bank accounts will pay fees and receive less of their monthly benefits.
That is the way I see this, anyway. This is a banker's paradise. Please tell me I am wrong.

[erronis]

10. And of course no financial regulation. Bankers Be Wild!

[peacebuzzard]

11. party for everyone !

Except for those who need it, this rampage through our government gets worse by the day.