(WASHINGTON) — A 25-year-old associate of Elon Musk and former Treasury Department employee was “mistakenly” given the ability to make changes to a sensitive federal payment system, officials with the Bureau of the Fiscal Service disclosed in a series of court filings late Tuesday.
Treasury Department officials said the “error” was quickly corrected, and a forensic investigation into the actions of Marko Elez — who resigned from his position last week after The Wall Street Journal unearthed a series of racist social media posts — remains ongoing.
“To the best of our knowledge, Mr. Elez never knew of the fact that he briefly had read/write permissions for the [Secure Payment System] database, and never took any action to exercise the ‘write’ privileges in order to modify anything within the SPS database — indeed, he never logged in during the time that he had read/write privileges, other than during the virtual walk-through — and forensic analysis is currently underway to confirm this,” wrote Joseph Gioeli III, a deputy commissioner at Bureau of the Fiscal Service.
The high-profile mistake at BFS — which effectively serves as the federal government’s checkbook by disbursing more than $5 trillion annually — comes as a federal judge in New York is weighing whether to continue to block individuals associated with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing Treasury Department records.
Lawyers with the Department of Justice initially insisted that Elez was strictly given “read-only” access to sensitive records, but the affidavits submitted by BFS employees on Tuesday noted that the 25-year-old was inadvertently given the ability to “read/write” the sensitive system that agencies use to send “large dollar amount transactions” to the Treasury Department.
According to Gioeli, Treasury Department officials also provided Elez with copies of the “source code” for multiple payment systems that he could edit in a digital “sandbox.”
“Mr. Elez could review and make changes locally to copies of the source code in the cordoned-off code repository; however, he did not have the authority or capability to publish any code changes to the production system or underlying test environments,” the filing said.
Elez resigned from his role on Feb. 6, and Gioielli claimed that the 25-year-old former SpaceX and X employee was the “only individual on the Treasury DOGE Team” who was given direct access to payment systems or source code. A “preliminary review” of his digital activity suggests that Elez stayed within the permitted bounds of his role when accessing the payment systems.
“While forensic analysis is still ongoing, Bureau personnel have conducted preliminary reviews of logs of his activity both on his laptop and within the systems and at this time have found no indication of any unauthorized use, of any use outside the scope that was directed by Treasury leadership, or that Mr. Elez used his BFS laptop to share any BFS payment systems data outside the U.S. Government,” the filing said.
The filings also provided new insights into DOGE’s ongoing mission with the Treasury Department, including to identify fraud, better understand how the payments are fulfilled and to enforce Trump’s day-one executive order that significantly cut foreign aid.
According to Thomas Krause — a tech CEO and DOGE volunteer who is leading the cost-cutting effort at the Treasury Department — DOGE is engaged in 4-to-6-week assessment of the Treasury Department’s payment systems. He was placed at Treasury not only to identify potential fraud but also understand how to use the Department’s payment systems to potentially cut funding to other parts of the government, the filing said.
“BFS is well positioned to help agencies and the federal government holistically understand and take stock of the problems [Government Accountability Office] has reported on,” Krause wrote.
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