WASHINGTON: An Elon Musk aide was mistakenly given clearance to make changes to the US Treasury Department’s highly sensitive payments system containing millions of Americans’ personal information, a department official said on Tuesday (Feb 11).
The admission came in a sworn statement to a federal judge amid heated criticism that the 25-year-old employee of billionaire Musk had editing rights to a system that handles trillions of dollars in government payments.
The employee, Marko Elez – who had no federal government status – resigned Friday after being linked to a racist social media account, only for Musk to announce that he was being reinstated.
President Donald Trump has tasked Musk with taking an axe to government spending as the leader of a new agency called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
The sworn statement, seen by AFP, says that Elez was supposed to gain read-only access to the system, under the supervision of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the Treasury Department section that manages payments and collections.
“On the morning of Feb 6, it was discovered that Mr. Elez’s database access to SPS on Feb 5 had mistakenly been configured with read/write permissions instead of read-only,” said the statement from Joseph Gioeli, an official from the payments section.
SPS stands for Secure Payment System.
An initial investigation showed all of Elez’s interactions with the SPS system occurred within a supervised session and that “no unauthorised actions had taken place,” the official added.
Elez gained access through a Treasury Department laptop computer, triggering an uproar among critics of the Trump administration and worries about the safety of Americans’ personal data.
DOGE has no statutory standing in the federal government – which would require authorisation from Congress – and neither Musk nor his aides are civil servants or federal employees.
Elez was one of two DOGE workers who gained access to the sensitive Treasury payments system.
