A 25-year-old DOGE staffer who a federal judge ruled could continue to access U.S. Treasury payment systems on Thursday morning was gone by the end of the day after his racist posts to X emerged.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has wrested control of the federal government from career civil servants in the early days of Donald Trump's second term. Marko Elez was a “special government employee” embedded at the Treasury as a part of DOGE. The federal funding slashing wunderkind and Musk lackey didn't account for his bigoted social media posts being uncovered by the Wall Street Journal, however.
Per the outlet, Elez's posts signaled support for a “eugenic immigration policy” and for repealing the Civil Rights Act in recent weeks.
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” Elez reportedly shared.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Journal that Elez had resigned from his role when asked about the posts.
Just hours before his reported resignation, Elez, along with Tom Krause, chief executive of Cloud Software Group Inc., was cleared by a judge to retain “read-only” access to sensitive payment systems at the Treasury Department. Elez was part of a team waging a war on USAID on behalf of the Trump administration and canceling authorized payments to the agency's employees.
Prior to Elez's resignation, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed Elez and Krause were “highly trained professionals” and not “some roving band running around doing things” in an interview with Bloomberg published on Thursday.
Elez isn’t the only DOGE “disruptor” with a sordid digital footprint. 19-year-old Edward Coristine has access to sensitive US government systems. Wired reported on Thursday that Coristine has past connections to adversarial foreign regimes. Coristine’s Tesla.Sexy LLC company offers services targeted at Russian markets that the outlet suggested would complicate background checks needed for official government clearance.
One intelligence analyst told Wired that there was “little chance that [Coristine] could have passed a background check for privileged access to government systems.”
House Democrat Don Beyer of Virginia said in a Thursday night press release that Elez’s firing was proof of the dangers DOGE posed to government services.
“Elon Musk gave a self-described ‘racist’ and eugenicist access to a system that controls all financial payments from the U.S. Treasury,” he said. “Everyone involved in hiring Marko Elez should be fired and ‘DOGE’ should be deleted.”
Shares