𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗨𝗡𝗘𝗟𝗘𝗖𝗧𝗘𝗗 𝗘𝗟𝗢𝗡 𝗠𝗨𝗦𝗞 𝗚𝗔𝗩𝗘 𝗔 𝟮𝟱 𝗬𝗘𝗔𝗥 𝗢𝗟𝗗 𝗞𝗜𝗗 𝗔𝗖𝗖𝗘𝗦𝗦 𝗧𝗢 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗨.𝗦. 𝗧𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗦𝗨𝗥𝗬~𝗛𝗘’𝗦 𝗦𝗜𝗡𝗖𝗘 𝗥𝗘𝗦𝗜𝗚𝗡𝗘𝗗 𝗔𝗙𝗧𝗘𝗥 𝗗𝗜𝗦𝗖𝗢𝗩𝗘𝗥𝗘𝗗 𝗠𝗔𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗥𝗔𝗖𝗜𝗦𝗧 𝗥𝗘𝗠𝗔𝗥𝗞𝗦, 𝗕𝗨𝗧 𝗠𝗨𝗦𝗞 𝗪𝗔𝗡𝗧𝗦 𝗛𝗜𝗠 𝗕𝗔𝗖𝗞

 

Marko Elez

Daily, I read comments on social media from Texas residents expressing their confidence in President Trump and his unelected sidekick, Elon Musk, to greatly reduce our national debt.

I'm pretty certain if these same folk knew the reckless, irresponsible approach the dynamic duo is taking, they'd be horrified.

Trump's primary role has been to issue executive orders, which, if they have to do with government finances, are largely illegal or impotent, as Congress holds the purse strings as per the Constitution.

Musk has been using a young 25 year old techie, Marko Elez, a former SpaceX and X employee, to access the U.S. Treasury's Bureau of the Fiscal Service(BFS) which controls all federal payments, including Social Security and I.R.S. tax returns.

While it was originally reported that this young man's access to BFS was "read only," that was found to be untrue, as Elez did have access to making changes to the U.S. Treasury with assets in the trillions. 

Treasury Department officials said Tuesday that the agency last week “mistakenly” and “briefly” gave a member of Elon Musk’s team the power to alter a sensitive federal payments database, prompting an internal forensic investigation that remains ongoing.

The disclosure, made in a series of court filings, undercuts the Trump administration’s repeated public claims that the DOGE team’s access to the federal payments system was limited to a “read-only” basis.

Elez resigned from the Treasury Department a day later, after The Wall Street Journal surfaced racist social media posts, and Treasury officials said he has not been reinstated to his previous role.

Elon Musk is pushing for Elez to be rehired, claiming he'd run a poll on X and "78% of those responding wanted Elez rehired."

Trump is fighting in federal court in New York, to have a judge's order lifted that barred any political appointees from accessing Treasury’s payment system, which manages the flow of $5 trillion of spending each year. 

On Tuesday, the judge presiding over the case clarified the original order to ensure that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other Senate-confirmed political appointees could access the system, but maintained restrictions on other political appointees and individuals affiliated with DOGE.

The affidavits make clear that the DOGE team initially came into the system with plans to block foreign aid payments, following an executive order by President Trump and to automate some of its functions.

Treasury officials wrote that they were directed to identify and flag payment files associated with certain accounts for foreign aid, including the Department of Health and Human Services refugee assistance. The goal, they wrote, was to allow the State Department to determine whether the disbursements should continue to be processed based on Trump’s executive order halting foreign aid.

       

Thomas Krause, center, DOGE "Hatchet Man"

Thomas Krause, another Musk aide who is the leader of Treasury’s DOGE team, also shed new light on the review he is conducting of the agency’s payment process in his declaration. Krause is the CEO of Cloud Software Groups and an unpaid Treasury employee who leads the agency’s DOGE operation.

Krause said that he provides the U.S. DOGE Service at the White House with “regular updates on the team’s progress” and receives “high-level policy direction from them.”

But Krause emphasized that he is a employee of Treasury. The Trump administration has also named him to take over the duties of Treasury’s fiscal assistant secretary, a powerful role that oversees the federal payments system, but he said he had not yet started that position.

Krause said Treasury agreed to begin on Jan. 26 a 4-6 week study of the federal payment system with the goal of reducing fraud and having the system work “more efficiently and securely.”

The project “remains in its initial stages,” he said, and the Treasury DOGE team was still in the process of receiving access to the agency’s vast payment databases and source code when the other member of his team, Elez, resigned last week.

Joseph Gioeli, a deputy commissioner of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and career Treasury employee, wrote that department officials developed various safeguards to mitigate the risks associated with granting Elez and the DOGE team unusually broad access to multiple systems, which included limiting his powers to “read-only” access. They also restricted read-only queries of the payment systems to “low-utilization time periods” to minimize the possibility of operational disruptions.

“The Bureau used several cybersecurity tools to monitor Mr. Elez’s usage and continuously log his activity,” Gioeli said.

“The Bureau is in the process of reviewing the logs of Mr. Elez’s activity on his Bureau laptop, and this review remains ongoing,” he added.

Bessent has publicly and privately said that the DOGE team at his agency had “read-only” access to federal payment data and did not possess the power to alter systems. And Treasury has made similar representations in court filings and in correspondence to Congress, though Democrats have slammed what they say are shifting and unclear explanations about the extent of the DOGE team’s access to Treasury systems.

After Elez’s resignation last week, Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Musk all said that he should be rehired by DOGE. A Treasury official said in a court filing that as of Tuesday Elez was not employed at the agency.