By Molly Goddard
6:58am PST, Feb 13, 2025
According to
The Wall Street Journal, the error was quickly reversed after
Marko Elez was able to make changes to the data. However, the worker later resigned from his job after racist social media posts from his past resurfaced.
"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," Deputy Commissioner at Bureau of the Fiscal Service
Joseph Gioeli III explained in the documents.
Legal representatives with the Department of Justice originally claimed Elez was only allowed "read-only" access to sensitive records. But affidavits handed over by BFS employees claimed the team member was inadvertently given access to "read/write" the sensitive system agencies use to send "large dollar amount transactions" to the Treasury
Department.
"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 legal papers claimed.
Elez left his position on Thursday, February 6, but the matter is still being looked into.
Still, Gioielli maintained Musk was the "only individual on the Treasury
DOGE Team" who was given direct access to payment systems or source codes.
"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 pointed out.
The accident comes as the Telsa founder and President
Donald Trump have continued their mission to overhaul spending in numerous departments of the United States government.
"I'm going to tell him very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check the Department of Education; he's going to find the same thing," the right-wing leader said in a recent interview with Fox. "Then I'm going [to tell him] go to the
military — let's check the military."
"We're going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse," Trump added. "And, you know, the people elected me on that."
