Overnight, Wired reported that, contrary to published reports that DOGE operatives at the Treasury Department are limited to “read only” access to department payment systems, this is not true. A 25-year-old DOGE operative named Marko Elez in fact has administrator privileges on these critical systems, which directly control and pay out roughly 95% of payments made by the U.S. government, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and virtually all contract payments. Talking Point Memo's Josh Marshall is now confirming that Elez not only has full access to these systems, he has already made extensive changes to the code base for these critical payment system.
25-year-old Marko Elez is the seventh member of Musk's secret cabal of hackers to have been outed by media. Elez (a former X and SpaceX engineer and a graduate of Rutgers University ) how has full access and is reportedly writing code in the most sensitive systems within government — The Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service.
The payment system at the bureau is, in essence, the federal government’s checkbook. It contains highly sensitive and confidential personal information belonging to every taxpayer in the U.S and its scale is vast. It disbursed 87.9 percent of all federal payments through the 2023 fiscal year, according to figures on its website. In the same period, it collected $5.47 trillion in federal revenue.
Elez has reportedly been given administrator-level privileges that theoretically allow someone to change user permissions, delete and modify critical files that contain highly sensitive and confidential information. “You could do anything with these privileges,” a concerned source told WIRED.
25-year-old Gavin Kliger, who worked at AI company Databricks, has now been outed as the individual who sent a staff-wide email to USAID workers ordering them to work from home as Musk moved to shut down the department, the New York Times reported. He is listed as a “Special Adviser to the Director” in the Office of Personnel Management, according to his LinkedIn. In his substack, Kliger referred to Matt Gaetz as a victim “of the deep state” and described Pete Hegseth as “the warrior Washington doesn’t want but desperately need[s].”
The youngest of Musk’s crew, 19YO Edward Coristine, is still in college and is the heir to his father’s popcorn brand Lesser Evil. Coristine completed a summer internship at Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink, according to his resume. He is listed as an “expert” within internal Office of Personnel Management records and reportedly appeared on a General Services Administration staff call, who did not know who he was or why he was there.
23-year-old Luke Farritor, 23-year-old Gautier Cole Killian, 22-year-old Ethan Shaotran and 21-year-oldAkash Bobba all have working General Service Administration email accounts, and access to the agency’s IT systems
Senior Democrats, academics, economists and political commentators have sounded the alarm over the unconventional hires. “What we're seeing is unprecedented in that you have these actors who are not really public officials gaining access to the most sensitive data in government,” Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan said. “We really have very little eyes on what's going on. Congress has no ability to really intervene and monitor what's happening because these aren't really accountable public officials. So this feels like a hostile takeover of the machinery of governments by the richest man in the world.”
Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren also wrote a furious letter to Treasury secretary Scott Bessent on Monday where she accused him of handing over access to the system to an un-elected billionaire and an unknown number of his unqualified flunkies. “It is extraordinarily dangerous to meddle with the critical systems that process trillions of dollars of transactions each year,” Warren warned.
Three federal employees’ unions announced Monday they were suing the Trump administration to block DOGE’s access to confidential Treasury data.
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