Musk Aide Given Payment System Access by Mistake: US Official

AFP/APP

Washington:An Elon Musk aide was mistakenly given clearance to make changes to the US Treasury Department’s highly sensitive payments system containing millions of Americans’ personal information, a department official said Tuesday.

The admission came in a sworn statement to a federal judge amid heated criticism that the 25-year-old employee of billionaire Musk had editing rights to a system that handles trillions of dollars in government payments.

The employee, Marko Elez — who had no federal government status — resigned Friday after being linked to a racist social media account, only for Musk to announce that he was being reinstated.

President Donald Trump has tasked Musk with taking an axe to government spending as the leader of a new agency called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

The sworn statement, seen by AFP, says that Elez was supposed to gain read-only access to the system, under the supervision of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the Treasury Department section that manages payments and collections.

 “On the morning of February 6, it was discovered that Elez’s database access to SPS on February 5 had mistakenly been configured with read/write permissions instead of read-only,” said the statement from Joseph Gioeli, an official from the payments section.