The US Treasury Division and White House officials repeatedly denied that technologists associated with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) had the ability to rewrite the code of the payment system through which the vast majority of federal spending flow . However, Wired reporting shows that a Doge operator at the moment when these statements were made had access to writing. Not only that, but sources tell Wired that at least one note was added to the Treasury records, suggesting that he no longer had access to the writing before senior IT staff said it was actually recalled.
Marko Elez, a 25-year-old does technologist, was recently installed at the Treasury division as a special employee. One of a number of young men identified by Wired who has little to no government experience but is currently associated with Doge, Elez previously worked for SpaceX, Musk’s spaces business and X, Musk’s social media business. Eelez resigned on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal inquired about his connections with “a deleted social media account that advocated for racism and eugenics.”
As Wired reported, Elez granted privileges, including the ability to read not only, but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: the Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and secure payment system (SPS) to The Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS), an agency that, according to the Treasury records, paid $ 5.45 trillion in the 2024 financial year. Reporting from the Memo of the Talking Points has confirmed that Treasury employees are concerned that Elez has already made ‘extensive changes’ to the code in the Treasury system. The payments processed by BFS include federal tax returns, social security benefits, supplementary benefits for security income and veterinary payment.
Over the past week, the nuts and bolts of Doge’s access to the Treasury were in the middle of an increasing crisis.
On January 31, David Lebryk, the most senior treasury official, announced that he would retire; He was placed on administrative leave after refusing to give Musk’s Doge team access to the federal payment system. The next morning, tell the sources told Wired were Elez granted and written access to Pam and SPS.
On February 3, Politico reported that Treasury Secretary Scott told the Republican Lawmakers in the House Financial Services Committee that Musk and Doge did not have control over the most important treasury systems. On the same day, The New York Times reported that Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that the access of Doge ‘is’ only reading alone’.
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The importance of this is that the ability to change the code on these systems in theory would give a Doge technologist – and, in the expansion, musk, President Donald Trump, or other actors – the ability to illegally mode the congress to cut authorized payments to specific individuals or entities. (CNN reported on Thursday that Musk Associates demanded that the Treasury interrupted authorized payments to USAID, which set down Lebrek’s resignation.)
On February 4, Wired reported that Elez in fact has administrative access to Pam and SPS. Talking Points Memo reported later that day that Elez “made extensive changes to the code base for these critical payment systems.” In a letter the same day that Musk or Doge mentioned, Treasury official Jonathan Blum wrote to Senator Ron Wygon of Oregon, ‘currently Treasury staff members who work with Tom Krause, a Treasury employee, will only read have the coded data of the payment systems of the fiscal service. “(Krause is the top operator at Treasury and CEO of Cloud Software Group.) The letter did not say what kind of access the staff members actually had.