A 25-year-old member of Elon Musk’s DOGE squad who resigned after his racist social media account came to light was “mistakenly” and “briefly” given the power to alter a federal payments database, a Treasury Department official said.
President Donald Trump’s administration had previously claimed Musk’s government efficiency task force DOGE, which has been tasked with recommending spending cuts, was limited to “read-only” access to a Treasury system that oversees $5 trillion in annual payments.
But on Feb. 6, officials discovered that a day earlier, DOGE member Marko Elez, 25, had “mistakenly” been given read/write permissions for a Secure Payment System used for large dollar amount transactions, according a court filing submitted Tuesday.
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The access was quickly corrected to read-only, and officials began a forensic investigation to review all the activities performed on the server and the database, according to the filing, which was previously reported by Politico.
That same day, Elez resigned after the Wall Street Journal reported on his history of racist posts on the Musk’s social media platform X.
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” he wrote in one post in September. “Normalize Indian hate,” said another, apparently in reference to the debate over H1B visas for highly skilled workers. “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” said a third.
Elez had worked for Musk’s companies—including SpaceX and X—before he was tapped for DOGE. As a member of the “department” of government efficiency—an outside panel operating without congressional oversight—he had been hired as a temporary “special government employee.”
DOGE has spent Trump’s first few weeks in office attempting to purge the civil service, cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts, and shutter entire federal agencies.
On Feb. 4, WIRED magazine reported Elez was able to alter the code the government uses to make Social Security payments, issue tax returns and pay government contractors.
After Elez’s resignation on Feb. 6, the Treasury department revoked his login access and took back his department laptop, cell phone and access cards, according to the court filing.
He does not appear to have returned, despite both Musk and Vice President JD Vance—whose wife is Indian—calling for him to be reinstated.
An initial forensic investigation found Elez hadn’t used the “write” privileges on the SPS and “was likely unaware” he’d had them, according to a sworn statement from his DOGE supervisor Thomas Krause.
A deeper investigation was still in progress when the documents were filed on Tuesday. They were submitted as part of a lawsuit brought by 19 state attorneys general arguing that DOGE had been given improper access to millions of Americans’ sensitive personal and financial data.
On Saturday, a judge issued a temporary restraining order barring anyone who isn’t a career civil servant or Senate-confirmed political appointment from accessing the federal payments system.
