DOGE Worker Marko Elez ‘Mistakenly’ Given Editing Access To Confidential Personal Data From Treasury Department Systems

Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) team member Marko Elez, assigned to the Department of Treasury, was “mistakenly” given “read/write permissions” on a secure payment system. Joseph Gioeli III of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service offered the details in a court filing connected to a case in which President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent were accused of allowing people without security clearances access to Treasury systems that hold “personally identifiable information and/or confidential financial information of payees.”

Elez was given access on Feb. 5 but was revoked the following day. Treasury officials said that there is no evidence that Elez knew he briefly had that elevated access nor that he used it to make any changes.

“On the morning of Feb. 6, it was discovered that Mr. Elez’s database access to SPS on Feb. 5 had mistakenly been configured with read/write permissions instead of read-only. A forensic investigation was immediately initiated by database administrators to review all activities performed on that server and database,” Gioeli noted in his filing.

Gioli said that the access given to the DOGE worker is unprecedented. He noted in the filing that the Treasury Department took strict preventative measures to manage the risks of DOGE’s access to the systems including “potential operational disruptions to Fiscal Service’s payment systems, access to sensitive data elements, insider threat risk and other risks that are inherent to any user access to sensitive IT systems.” 

Senior Advisor for Technology and Modernization at the Department of the Treasury Thomas H. Krause, Jr. wrote in a court filing that “the Treasury Secretary delegated the performance of duties of the Fiscal Assistant Secretary to me. However, he has not yet begun his duties. He was designated a Special Government Employee (SGE) and claims he is “the only Treasury DOGE team member.”

“A second Treasury DOGE team member, Marko Elez, began working at the Treasury Department on Jan. 21, 2025, but resigned from his role on Febr. 6, 2025,” Krause said. “Marko Elez is a highly qualified software engineer who previously worked at several of Elon Musk’s companies, including SpaceX and X.”

Elez had previously been tied to a social media account that had been deleted for making racist comments. Vice President JD Vance advocated for reinstatement on social media, and Elon Musk took to X as well in a post that reads “He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive divine.”