A member of President Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency resigned after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about ties between the staffer and a deleted social media account that promoted racism and eugenics, the paper reported Thursday.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed to the Journal that the staffer in question, 25-year-old Marko Elez, departed his role after the outlet inquired about an alarming X account possibly belonging to him. The account, which was deleted in December, once carried the handle @marko_elez and had posted multiple racist comments, including: “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity” and “Normalize Indian hate.”
The account owner identified themselves as an employee of SpaceX and Starlink ― two companies owned by Elon Musk, who’s overseeing Trump’s new DOGE project aimed at curtailing government spending.
A White House official also confirmed Elez’s resignation to CNBC.
Elez has been at the center of another controversy this week. On Tuesday, Wired reported that through his work at DOGE, he was given direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the U.S. government. Talking Points Memo confirmed Wired’s reporting, adding that Elez had “already made extensive changes” to the code base for the payments systems.
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said the incident involving Elez’s possible social media posts was a “scandal.”
“Elon Musk gave a self-described ‘racist’ and eugenicist access to a system that controls all financial payments from the U.S. Treasury. That system also contains the personal information including Social Security info of every American,” he said in a statement.
“This is why we have a process to vet civil servants, and why we hire and promote them based on merit, not their personal relationship to some rich guy,” he continued.
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Elez did not return a request for comment from the Journal.