A staffer connected to Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency resigned on Thursday after now-deleted racist social media posts were resurfaced.
The resignation was confirmed by a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Marko Elez, a 25-year-old software engineer, was working inside the Treasury Department to cut costs and root out fraud, as part of Musk's DOGE effort. Elez, who formerly worked at Musk companies X and SpaceX, was one of two temporary appointees at Treasury connected to DOGE who have been granted access to a highly sensitive Treasury system that processes trillions of dollars in payments every year.
The Wall Street Journal reported on a number of 2024 posts from an account connected to Elez on Musk's X platform and noted that White House officials confirmed his resignation after the paper pointed out Elez's activity on the social media site.
"You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity," the account wrote in September. "Normalize Indian hate," a separate post from that month read.
In July of last year, the account posted: "Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool."
In other posts, from December, the account pushed for repealing the Civil Rights Act and shared: "I just want a eugenic immigration policy, is that too much to ask."
All of the posts have now been deleted, but NPR has independently confirmed them using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which scrapes and archives vast parts of the open web.
Elez did not return NPR's requests for comment.
The resignation of Elez comes amid growing questions from lawmakers and former federal government employees about the dozens of staffers Musk has tapped to help him pursue aggressive cost-trimming, and in some cases, attempt to dismantle entire agencies.
As critics highlight legal and ethical issues surrounding DOGE's seemingly unchecked pursuit of government austerity, Democrats in Congress are running into obstacles. A Democratic-led attempt to subpoena Musk about possible conflicts of interest over juggling his DOGE role with the six companies he operates was blocked by Republicans on Wednesday. Democratic Senators are issuing blistering statements, and writing letters to Musk's companies demanding answers, but such moves are unlikely to result in testimony in Washington, as long as Republicans hold a majority in both chambers.
Elez's access to the Treasury payment system had raised alarms over whether sensitive data, including banking information of millions of Americans, is being shared with Musk and his allies.
Two unions representing federal employees and an advocacy group representing retirees sued the Treasury Department, accusing it of violating federal privacy laws.
Elez had recently been appointed a special government employee at the Treasury, the government told the federal judge hearing the case this week. That's a temporary appointment that allows the worker to perform "limited services."
A Justice Department lawyer said that Elez and another special employee at the Treasury connected to DOGE, Tom Krause, had "read-only" access to the payments system and that no data was being shared outside the agency, including with Musk's White House-based DOGE team.
On Thursday, the judge issued an order temporarily barring the Treasury from giving access to the payment system to anyone outside the department.
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