Doge Tech Bro, 25, Handed Control of US Treasury Payments ‘by Mistake’

Lambert here: This is the best reporting I have found on the security arrangements made for Elez’s laptop.

I cannot forebear from quoting the deck—

Marko Elez, one of Elon Musk’s team of ‘baby-faced assassins’ overhauling the federal government, had access to a sensitive system handling $5 trillion a year

Inside the US Treasury in Washington is an office that oversees $5 trillion in payments each year using a system generally understood to be administered by non-partisan career civil servants with copper-bottomed security clearance.

It now appears, however, that control of this payment system was handed to a fresh-faced, or at least only lightly bearded , software engineer named Marko Elez who arrived in the capital as one of Elon Musk’s cadre of plucky young tech bros at the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).

Lambert here: I have underlined the clever epithets. Here, at least, is a product the Brits can still export!

Suggestions that Elez, 25, had been given this extraordinary control over the strings of America’s largest purse first emerged this month but they have now been confirmed by a series of affidavits filed by Treasury officials and a fellow member of Doge. They say he was “mistakenly” given these powers very briefly and that he did not use them.

Lambert here: Which we know how, exactly?

Nathan Tankus, a researcher on the US monetary system who was one of the first to report on the powers granted to Elez in his newsletter, Notes on the Crises, felt that the affidavits were “perfectly” tailored to explain away concerns while “providing an innocuous explanation”. It was “roughly the equivalent of a student giving the excuse ‘I slipped on a banana peel and my dog ate my homework’,” he wrote.

[Elez became] one of the young professionals who answered the call of Musk’s Doge organisation that was seeking “world-class talent” ready “to work long hours identifying/eliminating waste, fraud and abuse”. They were to act on the federal government like a dose of Ozempic on an overweight actor, stopping it from gobbling up resources and radically slimming the entire body.

Joseph Gioeli, a senior civil servant, said in his own affidavit that the young Elez, along with Krause, the Silicon Valley executive, had arrived seeking to understand “payment processes” as part of an effort to identify “opportunities to advance payment integrity and fraud reduction goals”.

Gioeli is a deputy commissioner in the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which oversees payments to employees of the federal government, social security benefits, tax credits and tax refunds, along with billions of dollars of federal grants to the states.

He said Elez was given access to these payment systems and their underlying source code. He acknowledged that this access was “broader” than “what has occurred in the past”. It presented risks that payments might be disrupted, or that sensitive data might be compromised, he wrote. But he said the Treasury had taken steps to ensure its safety.

Lambert here: In what follows, I have helpfully marked up indicative and subjunctive verbs.

Elez was required to work on a Bureau of Fiscal Services laptop. This would be his only way of accessing the systems and his access would be monitored by “several cybersecurity tools” that would “continuously log his activity”.

He could also be blocked from accessing websites or from saving data to a USB drive or cloud computing services and the laptop would be encrypted so that no one else could look through its contents, for example if he left it on the train.

Gioeli said Elez was given “read only” access to the bureau’s secure payment system. But the day before he resigned, he was also given read/write permissions which would allow him to make alterations, he said. Gioeli said Elez was given this authority by a mistake and it appeared that he had not used it. “Forensic analysis is currently under way to confirm this,” he said.

Lambert here: “Given” by whom, and why? Who made the “mistake,” if mistake it was?

Musk, for his part, has insisted that his apparatchiks are merely seeking to identify fraud and to impose “common sense” controls on an antiquated payment system. His four-year-old son, X, stood at his feet as he spoke, dressed like the mayor of a small town in a long camel coat and a collared shirt with a chain around his neck. Once or twice he picked his nose while the president, a noted germaphobe, eyed him warily.

Lambert here: It’s the local color that makes it…..