DOGE's sloppy, ungoverned review of our records
Even a guy promoting eugenics and hatred of J.D. Vance's wife gets a peek
By Sam Bellamy
A quick show of hands: How many of you have shared racist messages on social media such as “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and “Normalize Indian hate”?
Anyone? No one?
That’s what I thought.
Meet Marko Elez, a 25-year-old who shared those thoughts and more, including a pitch for “eugenics immigration,” on Elon Musk’s social cesspool X.
Then Elez – if we’re to believe Musk, Vice President J.D. Vance and others – underwent a transformation a couple of months later, a transformation so thorough that he’s perfectly suited for a job perusing sensitive taxpayer data.
Elez, who once worked for Musk’s Space X, has been part of Musk’s band of unaccountable accountants ransacking federal government computers and freely digging through files that only a limited number of federal workers are authorized to see.
When The Wall Street Journal learned of Elez’s posts on X and inquired about them, he resigned, only to be rescued shortly afterward by Vance (husband of an Indian American woman), Musk and thousands of users of X.
Musk said he has decided he will rehire Elez after consulting with the denizens of X. Musk asked his followers if his Department of Government Efficiency should rehire a “staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonyms.”
Not surprisingly, 80% of 200,000 X respondents said sure, bring the bigot back.
Vance chimed in too, posting on the platform that, while he disagreed with “some of Elez’s posts … I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.”
In defending someone advocating hatred of his own wife, Vance now joins a special club with Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and other Republicans who’ve bowed to an individual who publicly, repeatedly and viciously insulted their spouses and other family members. In their case, the attacker was Donald Trump.
As it happens, this “kid” Elez – age 25, let’s remember – has been the subject of a federal lawsuit filed by the New York attorney general and more than a dozen other Democratic attorneys general seeking to limit DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department.
A week ago, a senior Treasury Department official filed an affidavit acknowledging that Elez had been “mistakenly” given access to write – and change – information in the department’s Secure Payment System, where bank accounts and other details are stored for recipients of Social Security benefits, veterans’ disability compensation, Medicaid payments, and Pell Grants, among other things.
According to the affidavit, the “error” was corrected and Elez’s authority had now been changed so that he could read but not alter documents.
“To the best of our knowledge,” the affidavit states, “Mr. Elez never knew of the fact that he briefly had read/write permissions for the database, and never took any action to exercise the 'write' privileges in order to modify anything within the SPS database – indeed, he never logged in during the time that he had read/write privileges, other than during the virtual walk-through – and forensic analysis is currently underway to confirm this."
To the best of our knowledge. Always a comforting phrase from the foxes standing in front of the chicken house.
The Treasury Department, now run by Trump acolytes, later announced that no evidence had been found of Elez changing anything. Nothing to see here, the foxes assure us.
But even if Elez didn’t tamper with anything, his very presence in this raid of government computers is yet more evidence that DOGE’s work is sloppy and dangerous.
We’re supposed to think the guy’s posts were just your run-of-the-mill activity for a young person sowing his wild oats. Sure, many of us have long-ago acts we’d rather forget, but sowing hatred at Elez’s age and in his position of power isn’t the stuff of wild oats, good judgment or strong character.
I’ve written a lot at Fight the Fire about the parade of reprobates strolling through Trump’s world and whispering in the ears of public officials who make decisions about our lives.
And lately I’ve read and heard arguments that this sort of nonsense – Elez’s rehiring at DOGE, the Gaza redevelopment plan, the installment of Trump as leader of the Kennedy Center – is intended to distract us from greater harms that Trump, Musk and their team are causing daily.
Perhaps. But it is extremely dangerous to dismiss events that normalize people like Elez, just as it is extremely dangerous for any of Trump’s true believers to be rummaging through our private records.
On Monday, The Washington Post reported that Michelle King, acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, has quit her job rather than go along with DOGE’s access to even more sensitive records.
“Among them,” The Post reports, “is the Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS, which enables tax agency employees to access IRS accounts — including personal identification numbers — and bank information. It also lets them enter and adjust transaction data and automatically generate notices, collection documents and other records.”
This will enable all sorts of abuse, giving men of low character, like Musk, Trump and Elez, the freedom to examine personal records they simply don’t need to see. How far are we from targeted harassment of Trump’s critics by the IRS or by other haphazard, quasi-governmental groups created in the DOGE mold?
Democratic leaders – and Republicans – should show that same courage as Michelle King and others in government who’ve protested this rampage and fight as long as it takes and in as many courtrooms as necessary to demand that Musk and his team be shut down.