Wired: A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System [View all]

[Dennis Donovan]

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."

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