Special Notice: My Colleague Rohan Grey Has Finished the Defining Law Review Article of the Trump-Musk Treasury Payments Crisis

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After a blazingly fast 4-week run of articles I needed to slow down last week and early this week to catch up to a couple major breaking news stories. You always hope these stories follow a certain, specific timeline but this is not always how it is, especially when there is further reporting whose results are out of your control. The current breaking news stories I’m working on are still in the works, so today’s email is another small update. You will hear from me soon, and it will be worth the wait.

At the end of my Paul Krugman interview, which was recorded two weeks ago, I made a point to plug Modern Money Network president and Willamette University law professor Rohan Grey’s then-unfinished article on payments bottlenecks at the Federal Reserve and Treasury. The interview itself explains why:

Tankus: I do want to plug that one of the reasons why I was so sensitive to this issue and able to kind of quickly jump on it is that my colleague, a law professor at Willamette University, Rohan Grey, had actually written a draft of a law review article all about making the federal government's internal payment system secure using our updated technologies, what are typically associated with what is now called central bank digital currency. But central banking is not really the essential place we need this. We need this in the Treasury. We need a Treasury issued digital fiat currency. And one of the essential really important things it would do is you could put a secure server in every agency. And so they could send payments directly out to people's wallets that would then get onto the whole banking system without having one bottleneck, the Bureau of the Fiscal Service or the Federal Reserve that could choke off payments and not be able to get payments out of there. And that seemed frankly like an obscure, abstruse idea. Like, OK, maybe that’s a good idea. And now it's one of the most important discussions about a reform proposal if we get out of this. And so I do want to plug that Rohan is fixing up that paper to put it out for late submission, this law review cycle. And I think it's a very important piece to get published.

Krugman: Have him send me a working paper version. I may not be able to understand it all but I usually think I know what actual expertise looks like even if I don't have it myself so… [Emphasis Added]

After an enormous amount of work, Rohan has incredibly managed to retool "Digitizing the Fisc" to speak to the moment we're in, even as previous iterations of the paper had already (broadly) predicted this moment. He has also, in the process, expanded and deepened the constitutional analysis underlying his framework and his proposal. I would be surprised if there has ever been a full length law review article readied in such a short period of time to deal with the many specific questions a specific ongoing constitutional crisis brought to mind. I would certainly be extremely surprised if any dealt with such a foundationally important constitutional crisis at such a high conceptual level while getting the details right. 

I am, of course, biased but I think this paper by Rohan is some of the most important legal scholarship in our era and it will be many months, perhaps even years, before anyone else is able to rival Rohan’s scholarship on what I’ve been calling the “Trump-Musk Treasury Payments Crisis of 2025”. Nothing illustrates the importance of synthesizing diverse arrays of scholarship for a unified analytical vision like the Treasury payments crisis and its interrelation with unconstitutional impoundment. I’ve done that in the form of this newsletter in ways that have gotten a lot of attention. Rohan has done it in the form of defining law review scholarship and it deserves a similar critical response to the critical response Notes on the Crises has gotten.

This paper deserves to be as influential as possible so if you are in a position to help place a law review article this late in the law review publishing cycle, please contact me or professor Grey at [email protected].

UPDATE: Rohan has now published a public version which you can find here. I’ll have a lot more to say about this paper in the future but for now, its sufficient to say: this exists and the world is different now that it does