A 25-year-old staffer with Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service was accidentally given — but did not use — permissions to edit a sensitive Treasury payments system, according to court records released Tuesday.
In a nine-page affidavit, Joseph Gioeli III, deputy commissioner of transformation and modernization at the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, states that DOGE staffer Marko Elez was “mistakenly” given “read/write” permissions over part of the Treasury Department payment system responsible for disbursing trillions of dollars every year. Those permissions were “promptly corrected,” and a subsequent review found Elez did not modify the existing Treasury database when he had access, Gioeli’s affidavit states.
The Treasury Department had previously stated that Elez was only granted “read-only” access to the payment system, although reporting by Wired and the financial newsletter Notes on the Crises had questioned that assertion. DOGE’s access to the payments system has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers and the public since David A. Lebryk, the former highest-ranking Treasury civil servant, resigned after refusing to stop foreign aid payments, as Musk’s allies had demanded…. “The initial investigation confirmed that all of Mr. Elez’s interactions … occurred within the supervised, walk-through session and that no unauthorized actions had taken place,” Gioeli’s affidavit states. “His access was promptly corrected to read-only, and he did not log into the system again.”
Vona S. Robinson, deputy assistant commissioner of federal disbursement services at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, states in a separate affidavit that only one payment — a Feb. 10 disbursement to the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a U.S. government foreign aid agency — was affected by the review of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s systems. That payment was forwarded to the State Department, after which a representative of the Millennial Challenge Corporation asked the Treasury not to process it, according to Robinson’s affidavit.
“To date, no payments, with the exception of the single MCC payment mentioned above, have been delayed or canceled by the payer agency” as a result of DOGE’s review of Treasury systems.
Lambert here: A year later, this looks an awful lot like putting the toothpaste back in the tube.
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