Young man linked to Musk has direct access to the US payment system

Marko Elez, former Spacex, has administrative privileges about a system that moves trillions in government payments, raising security concerns

A 25 -year -old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to the Treasury Department systems responsible for almost all US government payments, according to three sources who talked to Wired .

Two of these sources claim that Elez’s privileges include not only the ability to read, but also to write code in two of the US government’s most sensitive systems: Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service ( BFS).

Harsened in a safe mainframe, these systems control, at a granular level, government payments that in total represent more than one fifth of the US economy.

Although reports suggest that the so -called Task Force Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) of Musk has access to these treasure systems at a “reading only” level, sources say Elez, who visited an office in Kansas City where the systems are located BFS has many administrator privileges.

Normally, these management privileges can give someone the power to log in to servants through secure shell access, navigate the full file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. This could allow someone to ignore security measures and potentially cause irreversible changes in the systems to which they have access.

“You can do anything with these privileges,” says a source with knowledge of the system, who adds not being able to imagine a reason why someone would need them just to hunt fraudulent payments or analyze the flow of disbursements.

“Technically, I don’t see why this couldn’t happen,” said a federal IT employee to Wired on a telephone call on Monday night, referring to the possibility of a DOGE employee receiving high access to a government server . “If you had asked me a week ago, I would have said that this kind of thing would never happen even in a million years. But now, who the hell knows. ”

One source says it is concerned that data can be passed from safe systems to DGE operatives within the General Service Administration (GSA).

Wired reports showed that Elon Musk members-including Nicole Hollander, who slept in Twitter’s offices while Musk acquired the company, and Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla man who now runs a GSA agency, as well as a group of engineers Extremely young and inexperienced-they have infiltrated GSA and tried to use White House security credentials to access GSA technology, something experts said they were highly uncommon and posing a great risk of safety.

Elez, according to public databases and other records revised by Wired, is a 25 -year -old who graduated at Rutgers University in 2021 and later worked at Spacex, the musk space company, where he concentrated on vehicle telemetry, Star ship software and satellite software.

Elez then joined the X, the musk social media company, where he worked on artificial intelligence for research. Public repositories at Github show years of software development, with a particular interest in distributed systems, recommendation engines and machine learning. He does not seem to have prior government experience.

Elez did not immediately respond to a comment request. The White House and Musk also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In general, the US government pays money in one of two ways. Agencies such as the Department of Defense and the US Postal Service have legal authorization to originate, certify and issue payments on their own. The vast majority of payments, however – including federal tax refunds, social security benefits, benefits of supplementary income insurance and veterans payment – flows through federal payment services, which, according to Treasury records, paid $ 5 , 45 trillion in the 2024 fiscal year.

Bureau of the Tax Service, a bipartisan agency, is responsible for directly directing this money, moving it from government accounts to recipients. Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System are the mechanisms for which money is paid.

Controlling these mechanisms could allow someone to stop the flow of money to specific federal agencies or even individuals, a fear that Democrats expressed about doge. On Monday, Democratic senators warned of Doge’s invasion in the payment system.

“Will Doge cut the financing of programs approved by the Congress that Donald Trump decides that he doesn’t like it?” Said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. “What about cancer research? Food banks? School lunches? Veterans assistance? Literacy programs? Loans for small businesses? ”

The dispute over whether Doge could access Treasury systems led to a previously reported impasse between the interim treasure secretary, David Lebryk, and Musk associates. Lebrryk was placed on administrative license last week and later resigned.

“Lebrryk’s resignation has served as an example,” a source told Wired. “Any idea of ​​resistance or non -compliance seems to be disappearing after that, and everything I have heard from the leadership suggests that they intend to give the ‘doge’ operatives what they are asking.”