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25-year-old engineer linked to Elon Musk has direct access to federal payment system: Report
Elon Musk’s DOGE gaining Treasury payment system access sparks concerns over federal funds and taxpayer data security among consumer advocates and lawmakers.
A 25-year-old engineer, Marko Elez, who previously worked for two of Elon Musk’s companies, has direct access to US Treasury Department systems that handle nearly all government payments, WIRED reported.
The report added that, according to two sources, Elez’s privileges include the ability to write code, not just read, on two of the US government's most sensitive systems — the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS).
These systems, housed on a secure mainframe, manage government payments that together represent more than a fifth of the US economy.
While reports indicate that Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force has “read-only” access to Treasury systems, the news report quoting sources claim Elez, who has visited a Kansas City office housing BFS systems, possesses numerous administrator-level privileges.
Admin privileges generally allow a user to log into servers through secure shell access, explore the entire file system, modify user permissions, and delete or alter crucial files.
This level of access could enable someone to bypass security measures and potentially make irreversible changes to the systems they oversee.
“You could do anything with these privileges,” the report quoted a source as saying, adding that, with knowledge of the system, they could not conceive of any reason why someone would need such access merely for tasks like hunting down fraudulent payments or analyzing disbursement flow.
"Technically, I don't see why this couldn't happen," a federal IT worker told WIRED in a phone call late Monday night, referring to the possibility of a DOGE employee being granted elevated access to a government server.
According to public databases and other records reviewed by WIRED, Elez, a 25-year-old who graduated from Rutgers University in 2021, previously worked at SpaceX, Musk’s space company, focusing on vehicle telemetry, starship software, and satellite software. He later joined X, Musk’s social media company, where he contributed to search AI.
Public GitHub repositories reveal years of software development experience, with a focus on distributed systems, recommendation engines, and machine learning. However, there is no indication of prior government experience.
Elez did not respond to a request for comment. Neither the White House nor Musk responded to requests for comment.
On Tuesday, the Treasury Department said that it was not halting or rejecting federal expenditures and reaffirmed its commitment to protecting the nation’s payment system. This followed significant backlash after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was granted access to the system.
