DOGE Aide Has Full Access To The Top Government Payment System: Reports

An aide to Elon Musk has administrative privileges in the Treasury Department’s payment system, according to two separatenews reports — something the White House has denied.

Musk is in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which is a “temporary organization” President Donald Trump created via executive order rather than an official department.

Within the organization, a coterie of young aides with no government background have glommed onto a number of key choke points in the federal government, including the Office of Personnel Management, the General Services Administration and the Treasury Department. The offices, respectively, are responsible for the federal government’s workforce, its real estate, and its payment of a wide variety of funds, including Social Security benefits and tax returns.

The career civil servant who oversaw the Treasury Department’s sensitive payment system recently retired after being put on administrative leave; he had unsuccessfully tried to resist DOGE’s efforts to gain access. Musk aides have since gained access to the system, but White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted to The New York Times it was “read only” — meaning they couldn’t actually make any changes to the system or to outgoing payments.

But two new reports say otherwise.

Wired reported early Tuesday that a 25-year-old Musk aide named Marko Elez — an engineer who’d previously worked for Musk’s companies X and SpaceX — had direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for “nearly all payments made by the US government,” in the report’s words.

Two unnamed sources told the publication that Elez had many administrator-level privileges, including the ability to write code on the Payment Automation Manager and the Secure Payment System.

Between them, PAM and SPS are responsible for actual payment of money through the Federal Disbursement Services, which is housed within the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service. Federal Disbursement Services paid out $5.45 trillion in fiscal year 2024.

“You could do anything with these privileges,” one unnamed source with knowledge of the system told Wired. Someone with the level of access Elez has would typically be able to change user permissions or delete or modify files, according to the report.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo confirmed Wired’s reporting, writing that Elez not only had admin privileges but “has already made extensive changes” to the code base for the payments systems. The changes appeared to be related to potentially blocking payments and potentially leaving less visibility into what has been blocked.

Elez received full admin-level access Friday, according to the report. He has been working with some existing programming and engineering staff at the department who appeared to want to prevent damage to the systems, according to the report.

“Phrases like ‘freaking out’ are, not surprisingly, used to describe the reaction of the engineers who were responsible for maintaining the code base until a week ago,” Marshall wrote.

Neither the Treasury Department nor Leavitt immediately responded to HuffPost’s questions about the reports.