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Wired: A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System
Wired - (archived: https://archive.ph/BeuPr ) A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System
The Bureau of the Fiscal Service is a sleepy part of the Treasury Department. It’s also where, sources say, a 25-year-old engineer tied to Elon Musk has admin privileges over the code that controls Social Security payments, tax returns, and more.
Feb 4, 2025 1:02 AM
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.
“You could do anything with these privileges,” says one source with knowledge of the system, who adds that they cannot conceive of a reason that anyone would need them for purposes of simply hunting down fraudulent payments or analyzing disbursement flow.
"Technically I don't see why this couldn't happen," a federal IT worker tells WIRED in a phone call late on Monday night, referring to the possibility of a DOGE employee being granted elevated access to a government server. "If you would have asked me a week ago, I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the fuck knows."
/snip
The Bureau of the Fiscal Service is a sleepy part of the Treasury Department. It’s also where, sources say, a 25-year-old engineer tied to Elon Musk has admin privileges over the code that controls Social Security payments, tax returns, and more.
Feb 4, 2025 1:02 AM
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.
“You could do anything with these privileges,” says one source with knowledge of the system, who adds that they cannot conceive of a reason that anyone would need them for purposes of simply hunting down fraudulent payments or analyzing disbursement flow.
"Technically I don't see why this couldn't happen," a federal IT worker tells WIRED in a phone call late on Monday night, referring to the possibility of a DOGE employee being granted elevated access to a government server. "If you would have asked me a week ago, I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the fuck knows."
/snip
22 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Josh Marshall
@joshtpm.bsky.social
1h
A bit of professional disappointment that Wired beat me to it. But glad the info is out. I can confirm the key details of this report based on my own reporting -the name of the DOGE operative and that yes the reports about read only access is categorically false. Not only does Marko have full …
Josh Marshall
@joshtpm.bsky.social
1h
2/ privileges in this system but has indeed begun rewriting the code base of this critical system, significantly rewriting the software for this critical system. For more on this it was this situation I was referring to in a series of tweets from last night in which, as I said, I substituted the …
Josh Marshall
@joshtpm.bsky.social
1h
3/ name “Fred” because my reporting was not yet complete. In that thread I discussed the extreme anxiety of Treasury programmers who have been compelled to assist Marco about the changes that he is making to the code base. See the other thread for more on that.
Josh Marshall
@joshtpm.bsky.social
4/ I’ll have a fuller report on this early Tuesday morning at TPM. The relevant point is that I can independently confirm what wired is reporting here and the privileges to alter the code base go even further than described and that code base has in fact been significantly altered.
February 4, 2025 at 6:33 AM
@joshtpm.bsky.social
1h
A bit of professional disappointment that Wired beat me to it. But glad the info is out. I can confirm the key details of this report based on my own reporting -the name of the DOGE operative and that yes the reports about read only access is categorically false. Not only does Marko have full …
Tim Marchman
@timmarchman.bsky.social
7h
NEW: A 25-year-old who's worked for Elon Musk companies now has direct control over a Treasury system disbursements from which amount to a fifth of the US economy. He does not, our sources say, have "read only" access, but high-level admin privileges on a mainframe housing all the code.
Josh Marshall
@joshtpm.bsky.social
1h
2/ privileges in this system but has indeed begun rewriting the code base of this critical system, significantly rewriting the software for this critical system. For more on this it was this situation I was referring to in a series of tweets from last night in which, as I said, I substituted the …
Josh Marshall
@joshtpm.bsky.social
1h
3/ name “Fred” because my reporting was not yet complete. In that thread I discussed the extreme anxiety of Treasury programmers who have been compelled to assist Marco about the changes that he is making to the code base. See the other thread for more on that.
Josh Marshall
@joshtpm.bsky.social
4/ I’ll have a fuller report on this early Tuesday morning at TPM. The relevant point is that I can independently confirm what wired is reporting here and the privileges to alter the code base go even further than described and that code base has in fact been significantly altered.
February 4, 2025 at 6:33 AM
4/ I’ll have a fuller report on this early Tuesday morning at TPM. The relevant point is that I can independently confirm what wired is reporting here and the privileges to alter the code base go even further than described and that code base has in fact been significantly altered.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) 2025-02-04T11:33:52.538Z
The internet will take of this little shit.
