One of the first dramatic controversies surrounding the Trump administration, Elon Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency” unfolded unexpectedly in the U.S. Treasury Department, when surrogates for the billionaire Republican megadonor sought access to the federal government’s highly sensitive payment system.
A longtime career official tried to stop them and preserve the integrity of the system, but he ultimately resigned, clearing the way for the DOGE operation to gain access to the information it sought for reasons that went unexplained.
The move generated both tumult and litigation, and the latter has generated some preliminary results. But as the legal fights continue, it’s worth appreciating who, exactly, the “DOGE” operation deployed to the Department of the Treasury. The Wall Street Journal reported:
A key DOGE staff member who gained access to the Treasury Department’s central-payments system resigned Thursday after he was linked to a deleted social-media account that advocated racism and eugenics. Marko Elez, a 25-year-old who is part of a cadre of Elon Musk lieutenants deployed by the Department of Government Efficiency to scrutinize federal spending, resigned after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.
In one of his many offensive online postings, the young Musk surrogate wrote, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”
This was the guy, the White House’s “Department of Government Efficiency” sent to Department of the Treasury, as part of an operation that gave “DOGE” access to a highly sensitive payment system known as the federal government’s “checkbook.”
Scott Bessent, the Trump administration’s treasury secretary, told Bloomberg News this week that he has confidence in the personnel Musk has sent to his agency. “These are highly trained professionals,” Bessent declared.
One of these “highly trained professionals” was a 25-year-old staffer who wrote on social media, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and “Normalize Indian hate.”
While it’s reassuring that this young man is no longer a part of the broader White House team, there is some question as to whether his departure will be permanent. Musk, for example, ran an online poll on his social media platform, seeking feedback on whether Elez should be brought back.
What’s more, there’s the larger question of whether others on Team Trump with similar records to Elez should follow him out the door.
In fact, it’s not altogether clear where the Team Trump draws the line when it comes to racism. In 2018, for example, officials in the Trump White House started receiving media calls about a speechwriter and policy aide named Darren Beattie. Journalists wanted to know whether Beattie’s colleagues were aware of his role at a conference regularly attended by well-known white nationalists, and soon after, he was fired.
After he departed, Beattie’s racist rhetoric became even more overt — “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” he wrote — but that didn’t stop the Trump administration from welcoming him back and making him an acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy at the State Department.
Alas, the list keeps going on. Pete Hegseth was accused of Islamophobic rhetoric, and Republicans put him in charge of the Pentagon. Anthony Tata has a history of making Islamophobic comments, and the president also nominated him to a leadership post at the Department of Defense.
And then, of course, there’s the president himself, whose record of racism is unsubtle.
Elez is no longer on the “DOGE” team, but the question is whether he’ll be the first or the last racist to go.