Treasury Officials Warn Musk’s DOGE Boys Are a ‘Threat Risk’ to U.S. Payment Systems
Since the names of the younger, inexperienced people working for Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have become public, a flurry of reports have detailed their troubling histories of extremism and severe workplace infractions. One individual who resigned Thursday over revelations of racist posts on his X account has already been reinstated by Musk himself.
Perhaps more troubling was the news that, internally, the team that runs the Treasury Department’s payments systems believes DOGE is “the single greatest insider threat risk” it’s even seen. That warning came to light just minutes after it was reported that a 19-year-old working on the DOGE team was previously fired for leaking sensitive company information.
Musk’s reckless invasion of various government agencies, and his seemingly fanatical underlings’ total access to their inner workings, has appalled rank-and-file D.C. workers and triggered lawsuits.
On Thursday, the threat intelligence team at the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS) — responsible for annual payments in the trillions of dollars — sent an internal email warning employees about the DOGE group’s activity, according to a Wired report Friday. “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 team advised in the message, received by BFS’ IT department and others.
“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 email stated. “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.”
The White House and Treasury have both claimed that DOGE lackeys can only look at sensitive code, not modify it. But 25-year-old DOGE engineer Marko Elez has had unprecedented access to sensitive data at the Treasury Department, and according to Wired, he had administrator privileges over BFS payment systems at one point. (It’s not clear who else from DOGE may currently be able to rewrite code.)
Elez, who has worked at Musk companies X and SpaceX, resigned Thursday in light of reporting from The Wall Street Journal on a deleted X account where he reportedly spewed hate speech against Indian people, decried interracial marriage, advocated for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act, endorsed eugenics, expressed his hope for the complete destruction of both Gaza and Israel, and wrote: “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”
Musk, with support from President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance, moved to reinstate Elez on Friday. “He will be brought back,” Musk wrote. “To err is human, to forgive divine.” (So far, DOGE and the White House have announced plans to fire thousands of federal government workers.)
Bloomberg separately reported Friday that DOGE’s Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old college dropout who interned at Musk’s brain chip implant company Neuralink, was previously fired from an internship by the cybersecurity Path Network for leaking proprietary company information. He was accused of sharing the data with a competitor, and in Discord messages after his dismissal, bragged that he continued to enjoy “access to every single machine.” Coristine made this claim in a Discord server related to a corporate rival of Path Network.
On the messaging app Telegram, Coristine — known to have used variations of the pseudonym “Big Balls” online — was a member of groups associated with Kiwi Farms, an web forum that has mobilized harassment campaigns against transgender people.
Working on behalf of DOGE at the Office of Personnel Management, Coristine has A-suite clearance, giving him access to all IT systems, and has reportedly been looking for ways to implement chatbots and artificial intelligence software to replace employees at different government agencies.
The recent deluge of new and ominous details about the internet-addled boys of Musk’s demolition crew has hardly slowed the advance of DOGE, an outfit not so concerned with government “efficiency” as it is with making a spectacle of attacks on institutions hated by the far-right and big business.
It has teased that its next targets will include the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the IRS. Trump has gone as far as asking Musk to consider cuts at the Pentagon. At this rate, one has to wonder how much of Washington will be left by the end of another week.
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