Elon Musk’s DOGE given ability to modify payments—what we know

The Treasury Department had admitted that it mistakenly gave Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] the power to change a federal payments database.

What It Matters

Musk’s team has said that they are only looking at federal databases on a “read only” basis.

The Treasury Department court disclosure is the first indication that Musk’s DOGE team could alter federal payment databases.

Newsweek contacted DOGE in a private message on its X, formerly Twitter, account.

What To Know

Musk has vowed to cut $2 trillion a year from the federal budget, leading to a series of lawsuits by federal employee trade unions and Democratic states, which say that DOGE has no legal right to review federal databases.

In one major lawsuit in New York, 19 states are fighting to stop Trump appointees from gaining access to Treasury Department records.

On February 8, Paul A. Engelmayer, New York federal judge, imposed a temporary restraining order preventing Trump’s political appointees from accessing Treasury Department financial databases, through which Treasury makes $5 trillion in payments every year.

As part of that case, Treasury officials made written declarations in which they admitted that 25-year-old Marko Elez, a DOGE political appointee to the department, was erroneously granted “read/write” privileges to a Treasury payments system on February 5. Elez, a former Space X software engineer, could then make alterations to the Treasury payments system.

Elez resigned from DOGE the following day after The Wall Street Journal reported on his racist social-media page, now deleted, on which he wrote in September 2024: “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”

Another post from October 2024 stated: “Normalize Indian hate.”

The latest Treasury affidavits in the New York case say that Musk’s DOGE had sought access to the Treasury system to block foreign aid payments.

What People Are Saying

Tom Krause Jr., the leader of DOGE’s Treasury team, wrote in an affidavit on Tuesday that Elez was wrongly allowed read/write privileges on the Treasury financial bases.

“There was briefly an error that provided Mr. Elez read/write access to the [Secure Payment System], but Mr. Elez did not access that system during that time, and was likely unaware that he had any such read/write access,” Krause wrote.

Joseph Gioeli, a deputy commissioner at the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, wrote in a separate court affidavit that “the Bureau used several cybersecurity tools to monitor Mr. Elez’s usage and continuously log his activity.”

Gioeli wrote that, after it was discovered that Elez had read/write privileges, “a forensic investigation was immediately initiated by database administrators to review all activities performed on that server and database.”

What Happens Next

Engelmayer’s temporary order will remain in place until he conducts a full hearing in the case.

Treasury’s disclosure that a political appointee was granted read/write privileges to sensitive its databases will not help the Trump administration’s case.