Thank you. Because that admission makes the use of the word "classified" the red herring that it is.

No, it doesn't - because I'm sure there's a non-trivial amount of payments that get processed that classified. Perhaps not at the highest levels, but I'm sure that there's some level of protection for the payment information for military contractors and what not.

I was pointing out that lots of information in the federal government is restricted to only those people who need to have it - especially personal financial information - through means other than the national security classification system. That does not mean that the payments system doesn't also have information in it that's got some level of national security classification. Given the size of the military and national security agencies in our budget, I would be shocked if there wasn't some classified restriction on accessing the payments data.

They don't do "classified" work. If anything, they do the exact opposite. Everything that agency does should be visible to anyone in the public that wants to see it via FOIA.

You wouldn't be able to file a FOIA request to see your neighbor's tax returns. Or to get a copy of their social security checks. Or their medical records from the VA. Or anything that has a bank account number, like the direct deposit statements for however many federal employees have direct deposit. Etc.

Tons of information in the federal government is restricted to the people who work in the agencies that handle that information. That wouldn't limit the President, but it means that the people doing the grunt work at DOGE have to get the proper formal permissions before other federal workers should let them access it. If they failed to do that, it's them not following the rules - not the workers who tried to do the right thing.