Vittoria Elliott, Dhruv Mehrotra, Leah Feiger, and Tim Marchman report:
A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED.
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 (PAM) and Secure Payment System (SPS) at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a top-secret mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.
Despite reporting that suggests that Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force has access to these Treasury systems on a “read-only” level, sources say Elez, who has visited a Kansas City office housing BFS systems, has many administrator-level privileges. Typically, those admin privileges could give someone the power to log into servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.
Read more at Wired.
Over on Talking Points Memo this morning, Josh Marshall confirms that Elez not only has administrator privileges, but that he has been rewriting the code base of the critical system.
This may be the biggest privacy and data security breach in our country’s history, but of course, President Trump will claim it is not a breach at all because these people — people who had no security clearance and we have no idea what they will do with the data — are authorized by him to do all this. I wonder what it will take for members of Congress to wake the hell up and remember that the government is supposed to involve checks and balances.
This article is nothing more than histrionics. It’s making a huge deal out of something that was actually a simple mistake that got fixed almost immediately. The claim that a 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who used to work for Musk, has full control over the U.S. Treasury’s payment systems is completely exaggerated. Here’s what really happened: Treasury official Joseph Gioeli III admitted in a court filing that Elez was accidentally given higher access than he should have had for one day—on February 5. But that mistake was caught, and his access was corrected on February 6. Not only that, but there’s zero evidence that Elez even knew about this mistake, let alone did anything with it. And just to be extra clear, a federal judge already ruled that DOGE staff only have read-only access to certain Treasury systems. That means they can look at data, but they can’t change or mess with anything. No one is deleting files, rewriting code, or secretly controlling government payments. So, the whole “this is the biggest privacy and data breach in U.S. history” thing? Yeah, that’s just fear-mongering. A minor admin error for one day is not some grand conspiracy. The system worked like it was supposed to; the mistake was caught, and nothing happened. But instead of admitting that, the article is trying to turn a tiny hiccup into a national crisis.