this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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Summary

Despite official denials, a technologist from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had "write access" to critical U.S. Treasury payment systems.

Marko Elez, a former SpaceX and X employee, was granted admin privileges to systems processing trillions in federal payments. Reports suggest he made “extensive changes” before resigning.

Concerns escalated after Treasury officials falsely claimed DOGE only had "read access."

The controversy follows the resignation of a senior Treasury official who opposed DOGE’s access, amid allegations of Musk associates interfering with USAID payments.

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[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca 37 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

I’ve seen various discussions that sort all this out — he only had read access to the data, not write access.

Separately, he had write access to the underlying software stack and committed changes to live production systems, bypassing revision control and hub and spoke test environments.

All of this ended when someone surfaced tweets of his which identified him as a white supremacist — when that happened, he quit and left the facility.

[–] evan@midwest.social 13 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

There’s no way this person quit because their white supremacist tweets were uncovered. No moral hang-ups committing a coup but racism is where he gets shy???

[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca 4 points 12 hours ago

Maybe once it was uncovered, he got promoted?

[–] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

maybe when push came to shove, even he wasn't willing to do the nazi salute to elon to keep his job.

[–] qprimed@lemmy.ml 31 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I have read that he had administrative filesystem access to systems. god powers on the US governments financial system. INSANE.

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Which systems though? Applications like this run on clusters and have multiple tiers. It's not just a Windows pc.

[–] qprimed@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago

the term "system" here is holistic. hypervisors, load balancers, routers, switches, embedded controllers, operating systems, firmware, etc, etc, etc. everything, including client workstations and peripherals.

stuxnet comes to mind.