WASHINGTON: An Elon Musk aide who gained access to the Treasury Department’s highly sensitive payments system — with the option of modifying data — received the access by mistake, a department official said Tuesday.
The admission came in a sworn statement to a federal judge amid heated criticism that the young, inexperienced employees of billionaire Musk, who had no federal government status, had infiltrated a system that handles trillions of dollars in government payments and contains personal information on millions of Americans.
President Donald Trump has tasked Musk with taking an axe to government spending as the leader of a new agency called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
The sworn statement, seen by AFP, says that the employee, Marko Elez, was supposed to gain read-only access to the system, under the supervision of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which is the Treasury Department section that manages payments and collections.
But the employee was not supposed to be able to change anything with so-called “read/write permissions.”
“On the morning of February 6, it was discovered that Mr. Elez’s database access to SPS on February 5 had mistakenly been configured with read/write permissions instead of read-only,“ said the statement from Joseph Gioeli, an official from the payments section.
SPS stands for Secure Payment System.
“A forensic investigation was immediately initiated by database administrators to review all activities performed on that server and database,“ he added.
The initial investigation showed all of Elez’s interactions with the SPS system occurred within a supervised session and that “no unauthorized actions had taken place,“ the official added.
Elez, 25, gained access through a Treasury Department laptop computer, triggering an uproar among critics of the Trump administration and worries about the safety of Americans’ personal data.
Elez resigned Friday after being linked to a racist social media account.
DOGE has no statutory standing in the federal government — which would require authorization from Congress — and neither Musk nor his aides are civil servants or federal employees.
Elez was one of two DOGE workers who gained access to the sensitive Treasury payments system.
A confidential internal assessment reported by US media warned the Treasury Department that this access represented an “unprecedented insider threat risk.”
Before he resigned, a court order forced Elez back to read-only permission for the payments system as Democratic lawmakers and citizen advocacy groups warned about the dangers to national security and the economy because of the data he could access.
