Yesterday members of the US Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s (BFS) IT division and others received an email from BFS’s threat intelligence team sounding the alarm about Elon Musk’s DOGE coup team, WIRED magazine reports today. The memo recommended that DOGE members be monitored as an “insider threat.”
“There is ongoing litigation, congressional legislation, and widespread protests relating to DOGE’s access to Treasury and the Bureau of the Fiscal Service,” reads a section of the email titled “Recommendations,” reviewed by WIRED. “If DOGE members have any access to payment systems, we recommend suspending that access immediately and conducting a comprehensive review of all actions they may have taken on these systems.”
The memo continues:
“There is reporting at other federal agencies indicating that DOGE members have performed unauthorized changes and locked civil servants out of the sensitive systems they gained access to,” the “Recommendations” portion of the email continues. “We further recommend that DOGE members be placed under insider threat monitoring and alerting after their access to payment systems is revoked. Continued access to any payment systems by DOGE members, even ‘read only,’ likely poses the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.”
You may recall that Marko Elez, who yesterday resigned from the DOGE team over numerous racist social member posts, was one of a number of young men associated with DOGE who was granted read and write privileges on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the BFS, an agency that according to Treasury records paid out $5.45 trillion in fiscal year 2024. Now that Elez has left, there is great concern about what he has done and what information and data he may have taken with him.
In an agreement that the DOJ reached with the courts yesterday to restrict Musk's and DOGE's access to Treasury data, Elez was listed as one of just two DOGE Muskovites granted read-only access to the data on an “as needed” basis. But the threat intelligence team memo states that even just read-only access by DOGE members ”poses an unprecedented insider threat risk.”
It is highly unusual for the BFS threat intelligence team to identify an insider threat in the agency.
The recommendations were part of a weekly report sent out by the BFS threat intelligence team to hundreds of staffers. “Insider threat risks are something [the threat intelligence team] usually covers,” a source told WIRED. “But they have never identified something inside the bureau as an insider threat risk that I know of.”
I’m not sure how much of a flashing read light could be signaled by the BFS threat intelligence team. I pray that people with the power to do something about this are paying attention and having the courage to do something about it.
