As admissions go, it was an uncomfortable one. In one of several affidavits filed on the night of February 11th, Joseph Gioeli, a Treasury official in charge of technology at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, said that Marko Elez, a former Twitter engineer associated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (doge) had in fact had the ability to write code into the bureau’s sensitive payment systems. Mr Elez’s computer, Mr Gioeli testified, had “mistakenly been configured with read/write permissions” on one system. This came after officials insisted to Congress and to journalists that doge’s access was “read only.”
This was revealed in a lawsuit filed by the attorneys-general of various Democratic-led states, seeking to keep Mr Musk and his team out of the Treasury’s payment system. On February 8th a judge issued a court order that no political appointees should have access to the payment system, and that any copies of data they might have downloaded from it should be destroyed (this was later amended to allow Senate-confirmed officials access).
The court order—should it stand, and assuming it is adhered to—has suspended for now a saga that has gripped Washington for the past two weeks. That is, the question of what exactly has Elon Musk and doge been getting up to inside one of America’s most sensitive computer systems. The drama broke into the open on the morning of January 31st, when David Lebryk, the bureau’s long-standing boss and a career civil servant, suddenly resigned. As The Economist previously reported, Mr Lebryk often told staff members that if the bureau was in the news, the country was in serious trouble.
Mr Lebryk’s departure seems to have been sparked by a demand from Tom Krause, a software executive close to Mr Musk. Mr Krause ordered Treasury officials to halt payments made by the US Agency for International Development (usaid), according to emails obtained by the New York Times. Mr Lebryk refused, arguing that the Treasury’s job is not to refuse payments—only agencies can do that. He was put on leave, and then resigned. In the days after, usaid was all but shut down, though a legal battle over the status of many of its staff continues.
The Bureau of the Fiscal Service makes the vast majority of federal payments, worth almost a fifth of America’s gdp. Its system contains the bank details, Social Security numbers and tax identifications of almost every individual and organisation ever paid money by the federal government. Its access by political officials really has only one precedent: that of Richard Nixon’s use of Internal Revenue Service data to target people on the president’s “enemies list”. Not only that, the system has been built over decades on top of a 1960s “cobol” mainframe. Hasty messing around with its code could produce damaging errors that would be difficult to fix.
Treasury insiders feared that Mr Krause, who retains his job as ceo of Cloud Software Group, a big contractor, and Mr Elez were trying to find a way to shut down payments directly. In the days after Mr Lebryk resigned, Mr Musk repeatedly suggested on X, his social-media platform, that his team was doing exactly this. Treasury officers “literally never denied a payment in their entire career”, he tweeted.
The affidavits—by career civil servants under oath, not political officials—do suggest that Mr Elez did not succeed in directly blocking payments using the Treasury’s system. Or at least, this hasn’t been discovered yet. Instead they suggest Mr Elez was working to develop a way to automatically identify usaid payments and flag them, so that they could be blocked upstream. The court submissions do not yet shed light on what may have happened to many payments to contractors not associated with USAID that remained stalled, in defiance of two different court orders.
Yet even assuming the code-writing privilege really was an accident, the extent of access given to Mr Elez does suggest something serious was afoot. And the frustration of the project has sparked maga outrage. On February 6th Mr Elez resigned after the Wall Street Journal revealed he had previously posted a string of racist comments on social media. Mr Musk and J.D. Vance, the vice-president, immediately demanded he be reinstated. After the court ruling, Mr Musk called for the judge to be impeached, while Mr Vance suggested the government could defy his order.
Judge not
Appearing in the Oval Office with Mr Musk on February 11th, Donald Trump criticised the judge, but said he would comply with the ruling. The affidavits say that Mr Elez’s laptop was returned when he resigned, and that it had been fitted out with software intended to stop him from extracting any data he might have accessed. Since resigning, he has not yet resurfaced. Unless Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, intends on doing a lot of coding himself, that suggests it will now be difficult for doge to get back in.
Yet fears about doge more generally seem unlikely to subside. Even as the court fight over the Treasury gathered pace, other young engineers were going into the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, where they were also given complete “root” access over the data systems. This too includes access to sensitive information, such as the details of enforcement actions. The Treasury should resume paying its bills, but doge is not done yet. ■
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