DOGE Staffer Mistakenly Given Editing Access to Treasury Payments

When Elon Musk began digging into the U.S. Treasury, one phrase kept coming up: “Read-only access.”

As in, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would be able to view Treasury data — including government payment systems — but not make changes.

Now, however, it appears that at least one DOGE employee was briefly granted the ability to make changes to a “sensitive” payment database, The New York Times (NYT) reported Tuesday (Feb. 11) evening.

It was an error, the report said, citing a court filing, and one that was quickly corrected. The filing was related to a lawsuit challenging DOGE’s access to the federal payment system.

These records, the report adds, offer greater detail about the Treasury department’s decision to give Musk’s team access to a system that distributes more than $5 trillion a year on behalf of the government and includes Americans’ Social Security numbers and banking info.

In the filing, Joseph Gioeli, deputy commissioner at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, said that Treasury staff learned on Feb. 6 that DOGE staffer Marco Elez had received “read/write permissions instead of read-only” on one payment database the previous day. Staff members revoked this new access and are investigating the incident.

“To the best of our knowledge, Mr. Elez never knew of the fact that he briefly had read/write permissions for the S.P.S. database, and never took any action to exercise the ‘write’ privileges,” Gioeli said.

Elez resigned following the discovery of a lengthy pattern of racist social media posts. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have both called for him to be rehired.

Meanwhile, DOGE has been — temporarily — blocked from having any access to the Treasury payment system after a group of attorneys general from 19 Democrat-led states sued Trump and the Treasury department, arguing that DOGE’s access to treasury data violates the law.

Musk, during a news conference at the Oval Office Tuesday, said that his department’s mission is to uncover fraud within the treasury.

Earlier this week, a group of former Treasury secretaries who served under Democratic administrations criticized DOGE’s involvement in the agency in a New York Times op-ed.

They say these staffers had taken on roles once operated by nonpartisan civil servants, have not been subject to ethics rules, and lack the training and expertise to deal with private data.

They also argued that DOGE’s access to the federal payment system raises constitutional concerns: “Any hint of the selective suspension of congressionally authorized payments will be a breach of trust and ultimately, a form of default. And our credibility, once lost, will prove difficult to regain.”