Former Treasury Employee Accidentally Given Access to Payment Database
A former employee of X was mistakenly given permission to modify a Treasury payment database, leading to swift corrective actions and concerns regarding cybersecurity and privacy.
In a court filing, a career civil servant revealed that a former employee of X was mistakenly granted the ability to modify a payment database.
A young ally of Elon Musk and former Treasury Department appointee was accidentally allowed to make changes to a sensitive payment database, an error that a civil servant noted was swiftly rectified.
Career civil servants at the Treasury Department, including Joseph Gioeli, the deputy commissioner at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, provided sworn statements in response to a lawsuit challenging the access Mr. Musk's government efficiency team gained to sensitive federal payment systems.
The filings offer a more detailed account of the Treasury's decision to grant Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley software executive, and Marko Elez, a 25-year-old former employee of X, access to the payment systems, which distribute more than $5 trillion annually on behalf of the government. The Treasury Department and White House have consistently stated that Mr. Elez and Mr. Krause were given only "read-only" access to the data, which contains Americans' bank account and Social Security numbers.
However, in a court filing, Mr. Gioeli stated that Treasury staff discovered on February 6 that Mr. Elez had received "read/write permissions instead of read-only" to one payment database the preceding day. Mr. Gioeli confirmed that Treasury staff revoked his additional access and are investigating the incident.
"To the best of our knowledge, Mr. Elez never realized that he briefly had read/write permissions for the S.P.S. database and never took any action to exercise the 'write' privileges," Mr. Gioeli said.
Mr. Elez resigned from the Treasury Department on February 6, following the discovery of racist social media posts, though President Trump has suggested he should be reinstated. Mr. Krause was the only other Trump appointee granted access to the system, with the ability to read data initially retrieved by Mr. Elez, according to the court filings.
In the filings, the career Treasury staff and Mr. Gioeli outlined steps taken to mitigate potential cybersecurity threats posed by granting access to the sensitive systems, including monitoring Mr. Elez's activities. They also detailed a new process created by the Treasury to monitor and assist in blocking payments that the Trump administration is attempting to hinder.
Concerns about the representatives from Mr. Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency accessing Treasury's payment systems have alarmed Democrats, who have raised warnings about potential privacy breaches and blocked funding. A federal judge in New York recently blocked Trump appointees from the systems, although a subsequent order relaxed these restrictions.
During a speech in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Mr. Musk stated that his objective at the Treasury Department was to enhance tracking of government payments to identify any fraudulent activities.
"What we're talking about here, we're really just talking about adding common sense controls that should be present, but haven't been," he said.
