A former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) “mistakenly” received editing access to a sensitive federal payment system at the Treasury Department for a brief period last week before staff revoked his capabilities.
Marko Elez, a 25-year-old DOGE staffer who resigned Friday, did not use the additional privileges to make any changes to the database, Treasury official Joseph Gioeli III said in a court filing Tuesday.
“To the best of our knowledge, Mr. Elez never knew of the fact that he briefly had read/write permissions for the SPS database, and never took any action to exercise the ‘write’ privileges in order to modify anything within the SPS database,” Gioeli said.
Gioeli is a deputy commissioner at the Bureau of Fiscal Service, which oversees the system that handles 90 percent of federal payments.
Treasury officials previously said Elez and Cloud Software Group CEO Tom Krause received read-only access to the sensitive payment system, after the DOGE team’s access sparked outcry from Democrats and other outside observers.
Gioeli explained in the filing that Elez was the only employee who received direct access to the Fiscal Service system and its source code, although he was limited to “read-only” access and could not make any changes.
Krause, on the other hand, was given “over the shoulder” access, meaning he could view the system while it was accessed by another person with the required permissions.
“[I]t was agreed that in the near-term only a single Treasury employee, Mr. Elez, would be designated as the ‘technical team member’ who would exercise this read-only access,” Gioeli said.
Treasury staff discovered Thursday that Elez’s access to one portion of the Fiscal Service, known as the Secure Payment System, “had mistakenly been configured with read/write permissions instead of read-only.”
An initial investigation found that Elez had only accessed the system during a “supervised, walk-through session” with staff the day before and his access was “promptly corrected” to read-only.
“While forensic analysis is still ongoing, Bureau personnel have conducted preliminary reviews of logs of his activity both on his laptop and within the systems and at this time have found no indication of any unauthorized use,” Gioeli wrote.
Elez resigned on Friday after The Wall Street uncovered several racist social media posts he made from a now-deleted account. DOGE chair Elon Musk said the 25-year-old would be rehired, a move that was supported by Vice President JD Vance.
However, several recent court filings have said Elez is no longer employed by the Treasury.
