Marko Elez, Elon Musk protege, has gained access to systems that control $5.45 trillion in federal payments, including Social Security checks, tax returns, and more

        

Marko Elez (The Economist)

 

A member of Elon Musk's youth corps of  "engineers," 25-year-old Marko Elez, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the U.S. government, according to a report at WIRED. Under the headline "A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System; The Bureau of the Fiscal Service is a sleepy part of the Treasury Department. It’s also where, sources say, a 25-year-old engineer tied to Elon Musk has admin privileges over the code that controls Social Security payments, tax returns, and more," Vittoria Elliott, Dehruv Mehrotra, Maria Feiger, and Tim Marchman write:

Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a secure mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.

Despite reporting that suggests Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force has access to these Treasury systems on a “read-only” level, sources say Elez, who has visited a Kansas City office housing BFS systems, has many administrator-level privileges. Typically, those admin privileges could give someone the power to log in to servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.

“You could do anything with these privileges,” says one source with knowledge of the system, who adds that they cannot conceive of a reason that anyone would need them for purposes of simply hunting down fraudulent payments or analyzing disbursement flow.

"Technically I don't see why this couldn't happen," a federal IT worker tells WIRED in a phone call late on Monday night, referring to the possibility of a DOGE employee being granted elevated access to a government server. "If you would have asked me a week ago, I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the fuck knows."

What kind of problems could arise from such an intrusion, especially by a young man who might not know as much as he thinks he knows about federal systems? The scope of possible damage is enough to make the head swim. The WIRED team writes:

A source says they are concerned that data could be passed from secure systems to DOGE operatives within the General Services Administration. WIRED reporting has shown that Elon Musk’s associates—including Nicole Hollander, who slept in Twitter’s offices as Musk acquired the company, and Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who now runs a GSA agency, along with a host of extremely young and inexperienced engineers—have infiltrated the GSA and  attempted to use White House security credentials to gain access to GSA tech, something experts have said is highly unusual and poses a huge security risk.

Elez, according to public databases and other records reviewed by WIRED, is a 25-year-old who graduated Rutgers University in 2021 and subsequently worked at SpaceX, Musk’s space company, where he focused on vehicle telemetry, starship software, and satellite software. Elez then joined X, Musk’s social media company, where he worked on search AI. Public Github repositories show years of software development, with a particular interest in distributed systems, recommendation engines, and machine learning. He does not appear to have prior government experience.

Elez did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House and Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Broadly speaking, the US government pays out money in one of two ways. Agencies like the Department of Defense and the US Postal Service are legally authorized to originate, certify, and issue payments on their own. The vast majority of payments, though—including federal tax returns, Social Security benefits, Supplemental Security Income benefits, and veteran’s pay—flow through the Federal Disbursement Services, which according to Treasury records paid out $5.45 trillion in fiscal year 2024. The Bureau of the Fiscal Service, a nonpartisan body, is charged with directing this money appropriately, moving it from government accounts to recipients. The Payment Automation Manager and the Secure Payment System are the mechanisms through which the money is paid out.

Control of those mechanisms could allow someone to choke off money to specific federal agencies or even individuals, a fear that Democrats have expressed about DOGE. On Monday, Senate Democrats warned of DOGE’s encroachment into the payment system. “Will DOGE cut funding to programs approved by Congress that Donald Trump decides he doesn’t like,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. “What about cancer research? Food banks? School lunches? Veterans aid? Literacy programs? Small business loans?”

The fight over whether DOGE could access Treasury systems led to a previously reported standoff between acting Treasury secretary David Lebryk and Musk’s associates. Lebryk was placed on administrative leave last week and subsequently resigned.

“Lebryk’s resignation set an example,” a source tells WIRED. “Any idea of resistance or noncompliance seems to be fading in the wake of that, and everything I have heard from leadership suggests they intend to give the ‘DOGE’ operatives what they are asking for.”