Early this morning WIRED magazine dropped some frightening reporting about Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer who has worked for two of Elon Musk’s companies and is one of Musk’s DOGEbro cronies. Three sources have confirmed to WIRED that Elez — someone who has not been elected or appointed to any government position — has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the U.S. government. Two of WIRED’s three sources claim that Elez’s access privileges allow him to not just read the systems code but also write code for the systems.
Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a secure mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.
Talking Points Memo has confirmed WIRED’s reporting, and also reports that Elez has already made extensive changes to the code base for these critical payment systems. The WIRED and TPM reporting goes against previous reporting from Politico that Trump cronies had “read only” access to the Treasury payment systems. These systems directly control and pay out roughly 95% of payments made by the U.S. government, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and virtually all contract payments.
“You could do anything with these privileges,” says one source with knowledge of the system, who adds that they cannot conceive of a reason that anyone would need them for purposes of simply hunting down fraudulent payments or analyzing disbursement flow.
WIRED notes that control of these Treasury payment mechanisms could allow someone to choke off money to specific federal agencies or even individuals. As a federal IT worker told WIRED:
"If you would have asked me a week ago, I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the fuck knows."
Here’s a bit more information about Elez — the person who may control whether or not you or your family and friends receive the government payments that they rely on:
Elez, according to public databases and other records reviewed by WIRED, is a 25-year-old who graduated Rutgers University in 2021 and subsequently worked at SpaceX, Musk’s space company, where he focused on vehicle telemetry, starship software, and satellite software. Elez then joined X, Musk’s social media company, where he worked on search AI. Public Github repositories show years of software development, with a particular interest in distributed systems, recommendation engines, and machine learning. He does not appear to have prior government experience.
(The Daily Beast reports that Elez has wiped much of his online presence, including his LinkedIn page, much like others in DOGE who were identified Sunday,)
This is truly a frightening development in Elon Musk’s continued takeover of the federal government. Although a few Dem leaders have bleated out a few messages of concern about this, I haven’t yet seem them take any decisive action to stop this madness. I hope that changes — before it’s too late.
P.S. A few plugs:
- WIRED magazine has been doing some excellent journalism in covering the Trump administration’s corruption and fascism — they type of reporting that is no longer being done by the legacy media that is working hard to appease Musk and Trump. If you aren’t yet subscribed to WIRED I encourage you to do so — an annual digital subscription is just $1 per month! Subscribe here.
- I first learned about this breaking story on Bluesky this morning. If you aren’t yet on Bluesky, I urge you to join us there!