DOGE staffer who accessed Treasury Department payment systems resigns after racist posts exposed

An Elon Musk deputy who accessed sensitive Treasury Department payment systems has resigned after social media posts of his came to light that espoused racist beliefs.

Marko Elez, 25, who worked for a number of companies run by Elon Musk and was part of the billionaire’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force engaged in dismantling federal offices, resigned Thursday, a White House official told The Hill.

Elez’s racist, now-deleted social media posts were uncovered and first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

“Normalize Indian hate,” the account associated with Elez posted in September, regarding people of Indian ethnicity who work in the U.S. tech sector, the Journal reported.

“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” the account wrote on Elon Musk’s social media site X, the Journal reported.

Despite a Treasury Department statement saying that Elez and another new staffer at the department by the name of Tom Krause were given “read-only” access to the highly sensitive payment systems, numerous reports have indicated that Elez had the ability to rewrite the payment system base code.

A federal judge issued an order Thursday limiting but also confirming Elez's access to the systems.

The access “to payment records will be ‘read only,’” the order said.

Wired magazine first identified Elez as having access to the systems, reporting Tuesday that he had administrator-level privileges to the back end and that he’d visited an office in Kansas City where servers were housed.

Elez had emerged as one of the central figures in Musk’s rapid and roughshod overhaul of federal agencies in recent days, during which the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), one of the central agencies carrying out U.S. foreign policy, has been eviscerated.

Emails between Krause and the newly appointed Treasury Department chief of staff show that DOGE employees had intended to target USAID payments with their access to the payment systems, The New York Times reported Thursday.

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