Technology
Senator warns of national security risks after Elon Musk’s DOGE granted ‘full access’ to sensitive Treasury systems

A senior U.S. lawmaker says representatives of Elon Musk were granted “full access” to a U.S. Treasury payments system used to disperse trillions of dollars to Americans each year, and warned that Musk’s access to the system poses a “national security risk.”
Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a post on Bluesky on Saturday that sources told his office Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave Musk’s team, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, authorization to access the highly sensitive Treasury system on Friday. The authorization comes following a standoff earlier in the week, in which the Treasury’s highest-ranking career official left the department following requests from Musk’s team for access to the system.
“Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk’s own companies. All of it,” wrote Wyden in the post, referring to DOGE’s access.
The New York Times also reported that Bessent granted DOGE access to the Treasury’s payment system on Friday. One of the DOGE representatives granted access is said to be Tom Krause, the chief executive of Cloud Software Group, which owns Citrix and several other companies. Krause did not return TechCrunch’s request for comment. A spokesperson for the Treasury did not comment when emailed Saturday.
This is the latest effort by Musk and his associates to take over the inner workings of the U.S. federal government following President Trump’s return to office on January 20. Following his inauguration, Trump immediately ordered Musk to begin making widespread cuts to federal government spending.
The system run by the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service controls the disbursements of around $6 trillion in federal funds to American households, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, tax refunds, and payments to U.S. federal employees and contractors, according to a letter written by Wyden and sent to Bessent a day earlier. Access to the payments system was historically limited to a few staff because it contains personal information about millions of Americans who receive payments from the federal government, per the Times.
According to Wyden’s letter, the payments system “simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy.”
In his letter, Wyden said he was concerned that Musk’s extensive business operations in China “endangers U.S. cybersecurity” and creates conflicts of interest that “make his access to these systems a national security risk.”
Last year, the Biden administration blamed China for a series of intrusions targeting U.S. critical infrastructure, the theft of senior American officials’ phone records during breaches of several U.S. phone and internet giants, and a breach of the Treasury’s own systems late last year. Wyden, also a long-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said it was “unusual to be granting access to sensitive systems to an individual with such significant business interests in China.”
Several other federal departments are under scrutiny by DOGE, including the federal government’s own human resources department, known as the Office of Personnel Management.
Reuters reported on Friday that Musk’s representatives locked out career civil servants from computer systems, which contain the personal data and human resources files of millions of federal employees. The OPM was hacked in 2015, which the U.S. government later attributed to China, resulting in the theft of personnel records on more than 22 million U.S. government employees, including staff with security clearances.

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Technology
North Carolina Amazon workers vote against unionizing

Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Garner, North Carolina voted against unionizing in election results announced today.
According to Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment (CAUSE), the worker group seeking to form the union, 3,276 ballots were cast in the election, with 25.3% of votes in favor of unionizing and 74.7% against. The results still need to be certified by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
In a statement provided to CNBC, CAUSE blamed the results on “Amazon’s willingness to break the law,” claiming, “Amazon’s relentless and illegal efforts to intimidate us prove that this company is afraid of workers coming together to claim our power.”
Amazon spokesperson Eileen Hards denied the company had broken any laws and said, “We’re glad that our team in Garner was able to have their voices heard, and that they chose to keep a direct relationship with Amazon.”
Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island voted to unionize in 2022, and workers at a Philadelphia location of Amazon-owned Whole Foods also voted in favor of unionization earlier this year. The grocery chain has asked the NLRB to set those results aside.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s lawyers recently joined SpaceX in a legal challenge to the NLRB’s structure.

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Technology
Uber sues DoorDash, alleging anti-competitive tactics

Ride-share giant Uber filed a lawsuit Friday against DoorDash, accusing the delivery outfit of stifling competition by intimidating restaurant owners into exclusive deals.
Uber alleges in the lawsuit, filed in Superior Court of California, that its chief rival bullied restaurants into only working with DoorDash. Uber claims that DoorDash, which holds the largest share of the food delivery market in the U.S., threatens restaurants with multimillion-dollar penalties or the removal or demotion of the businesses’ position on the DoorDash app.
Specifically, Uber claims DoorDash pressures restaurants to strike exclusive or near-exclusive agreements for first-party delivery services, meaning that DoorDash insists on solely handling orders placed through restaurants’ own websites, says Uber.
“Uber’s case has no merit,” said a DoorDash spokesperson in an email to TechCrunch on Friday. “Their claims are unfounded and based on their inability to offer merchants, consumers, or couriers a quality alternative.”
DoorDash and Uber Eats are best known for their respective apps to connect restaurant, consumers and gig economy workers. Consumers use the apps to find and order food like pizza, egg rolls, or pad thai from restaurants. A gig economy worker then picks up and delivers the food to the consumer.
But the two companies also compete with their own white-label delivery services – called Uber Direct and DoorDash Drive on-Demand – which both launched in 2020. These services are cheaper for restaurants, allowing patrons to order directly from the restaurants’ own apps and websites, while Uber and DoorDash manage the couriers behind the scenes.
Uber claims in its suit that DoorDash handles first-party deliveries for more than 90% of the largest enterprise restaurants in America, and it alleges DoorDash used anticompetitive practices to win the market.
“More than 1 million merchants partner with Uber Eats because we’ve helped them to reach more customers and provided them the freedom to decide how they want to grow their businesses with delivery,” Sarfraz Maredia, head of the Americas for delivery at Uber, said in an emailed statement. “We’ve increasingly heard complaints from restaurants that DoorDash’s tactics are limiting that freedom and punishing them for seeking better options. We hope this filing puts an end to those unfair practices so that restaurants can choose what’s best for them without fear of penalty or retribution.”
In one example from the lawsuit, Uber says that an unnamed “significant restaurant company” told the company it would not move forward with a long-planned rollout of Uber Direct across several of its restaurant brands. The reason, Uber claims, is because DoorDash allegedly threatened to increase the rates it charges the restaurant company to use DoorDash’s third-party delivery services if it continued to use Uber Direct.
Uber says this was not a one-off event, but rather that multiple customer have told the company they feel “like they have a ‘gun to their head,’ that DoorDash is a ‘monopolist,’ and that they are being bullied by DoorDash.”
Uber has requested a jury trial; the company did not specify the amount of damages in the complaint. However, Uber claims these anticompetitive practices have cost the company “millions of dollars in revenue” and also restricted the growth of Uber Direct.

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Technology
DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng is reportedly set to meet with China’s Xi Jinping

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng is reportedly set to meet with China’s top politicians, including Chinese leader Xi Jinping, during a summit that Alibaba founder Jack Ma is also expected to attend.
The summit, which could happen as soon as next week, may be intended as a signal by China’s Communist Party that it aims to adopt a more supportive stance toward domestic private-sector firms, according to Bloomberg. In 2020, Chinese authorities effectively prevented Alibaba from executing what would have been the biggest public offering in history.
Liang, who founded DeepSeek in 2023 as a subsidiary of his quantitative hedge fund, High-Flyer, rose to prominence last month after DeepSeek’s openly available AI models showed strong performance against leading models from OpenAI and other American AI companies. U.S. officials have raised concerns over the explosive popularity of DeepSeek’s models and services, which they perceive as a threat to the U.S.’ pole position in the AI race.

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