A TECHIE BASEMENT DWELLER CAN NOW FUCK UP YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY

Shit’s gettin’ real, as they say.

A 25-year-old engineer in Elon Musk’s DOGE has HAD access to a “top-secret” federal payment system within the Treasury Department since approximately a week ago

The engineer, Marko Elez, reportedly has the ability to alter the code responsible for the vast majority of payments the U.S. government makes to its citizens, including Social Security, tax returns, and much more. He has been given a security clearance granting him “admin” status.

Elez was identified by sources who spoke to Wired, making him the seventh young DOGE staffer to be unmasked on Musk’s team.

The supposed whiz kid has been granted access “not just to read but to write code” within the U.S. Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, Wired reported.

These systems are said to be housed on a “top-secret mainframe” that hosts information about government payments amounting to more than a fifth of the U.S. economy. That includes grants and payouts to government contractors that would likely include private sector competitors to Musk’s companies.

The world’s richest man initially pushed back against reports identifying his team of young staffers and has downplayed the power they have over sensitive information, claiming his team has “read-only access” to the systems they have infiltrated.

Wired’s report claims Elez has beyond “read only” powers in his role, however, which has granted him the ability to “navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files.” There is no evidence (at present)to suggest Elez has acted nefariously with his newly-acquired access, however.

These critical systems Elex is now in control of directly control and pay out roughly 95% of payments made by the U.S. government, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and virtually all contract payments. Elez not only has full access to these systems, he has already made extensive changes to the code base for these critical payment systems.

Elez and possibly other DOGE operatives received full admin-level access on Friday, January 31st. The claim of “read only” access was either false from the start or later fell through. The DOGE team, which appears to be mainly or only Elez for the purposes of this project, has already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment system. They have not locked out the existing programmer/engineering staff but have rather leaned on them for assistance, which the staff appear to have painedly provided hoping to prevent as much damage as possible — “damage” in the sense not of preventing the intended changes but avoiding crashes or a system-wide breakdown caused by rapidly pushing new code into production with a limited knowledge of the system and its dependencies across the federal government.

The changes that have been made all seem to relate to creating new paths to block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked. The changes are not being tested in a dev environment (i.e., a not-live environment) but have already been pushed into production. This is code that appears to be mainly the work of Elez, who was first introduced to the system probably roughly a week ago and certainly not before the second Trump inauguration. No payments have as yet been blocked and that the incumbent engineering team was able to convince Elez to push the code live to impact only a subset of the universe of payments the system controls. There is no specific information about this access being used to drill down into the private financial or proprietary information of payment recipients, though it appears that the incumbent staff has only limited visibility into what Elez is doing with the access. He has, however, looked extensively into the categories and identity of payees to see how certain payments can be blocked.

Adding further anxiety about the stability of the system there is a long-scheduled migration scheduled to take place this weekend which could interact in unpredictable ways with the code changes already described.

Multiple government engineers/programmers are being pressed into assisting Elez and doing code reviews, terrified that the whole system will end up going down — meanwhile “Marko” refuses to identify himself to most or likely all of these new colleagues by anything but his first name.

Elez has wiped much of his online presence, including his LinkedIn page, much like others in DOGE who were identified Sunday. An X account in his name has no posts and no profile photo, leaving only a cover image of a SpaceX rocket and an American flag.

Records suggest Elez graduated from Rutgers University in 2021 and went on to work Musk’s space company, SpaceX, where reports say he focused on vehicle telemetry, starship software, and satellite software.

Elez then joined Musk’s team at X, where he worked on search AI. It appears he has no prior experience in government work, but Musk has been resharing posts that have claimed this is a good thing for his young team, posting this morning. “The [average] age of NASA’s mission control team during the Apollo era was 27— hey put humans on the moon,. Young people bring a force of curiosity and creativity that can disrupt the status quo. If we’re serious about cutting waste in gov spending, let’s not turn away new minds.”

Just what we need, the fate of the country in the hands of an antisocial basement dweller. If I had ever tried to use this scenario for a science fiction political thriller, I’d have been thrown out of the room after making the pitch.

So, the shit is - as they say - getting serious. From day to day - hell, from hour to hour - we are in the position of having modern life destroyed by antisocial libertarian anarchists. I could really use your support as a paid subscriber to help me do the fulltime job of keeping up with this insanity. That’s only $7/month or $70/year. And it really helps.

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