Onlookers freak out as 25-year-old set loose on Treasury computer system
rawstory.com
rawstory.com
The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910910 - Feb 2025 (2691 comments)
Aristotle did say in Politics IV that appointing public office by lottery, drawing from the real public, is more democratic (power to the people) than elections, which is an oligarchic exercise.
I've always held the opinion that elected officials should have to use public health care, send their kids to public schools, and use public transport.
This would ensure that they would have to maintain these institutions and be able to face their constituents on the daily.
-- Gustavo Petro
More like consolidating and cementing. It had already been built out
Obviously OP is not saying it was unilaterally better and the idea being commented on is just public lottery vs election. You can lift out that idea and apply our current understanding of “public” and the point of OP still stands.
By excluding over 3/4 of the population, we would hardly get what we think of as democracy.
With those exclusions, the power of being a citizen would increase dramatically and the lottery would make it unlikely bands of eligible citizens would unite to expand the electorate but instead would seek to make membership more stringent, like DPRK's haeksim.
Choice by lottery would also fail to exclude men who have no desire or capacity to do whatever job it is they pulled. I do not know what they did in ancient Greece but in modern times that would lead to a bureaucratic class with the leader being only a figurehead at their mercy--and at times that would be very good. But the bureaucrats class would not be the voice of the people, would not be democratic.
I felt this was obvious from the exclusions and so didn't see the need to elaborate.
It is not, what happened is someone said “I have authority from the President which trumps your ‘frameworks’ and ‘processes’, and if you fight me on this you will be fired and then we’ll bring in your replacement with the same deal and repeat as necessary until there is compliance with our demands”.
The "base layer" has always been "men with guns".
If you fail to cooperate, an armed security guard will take your badge and escort you to the build exit.
If that security guard does not cooperate, another man with a gun can always be found.
> Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
source: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...
Without a US government the US greenback is worthless, and so is any power.
Do people believe in these?
I've had tons of access over the years to all sort of projects right to my laptop, despite compliance and audits.
In term 1 Trump cabinet and staffers were Bush veterans whereas this term they are Trump loyalists. I tried convincing people that this time would be very different, but I got shouted down.
Funny how quickly we jump to 'you must have voted for them' these days. Maybe the real problem isn't who voted for who, but how we've all gotten so used to seeing each other as enemies instead of neighbors who sometimes disagree. Just a thought.
assumptions: The publicly-available vote count numbers are correct and the US has a total population of around 341 million people.
The view that our Republican party got a "conservative mandate" and "won by a landslide" is an interesting one when considered with the above facts. They won by a margin of ~1.6% of the votes cast. The victory looks like a large one only when viewed through the distorted lenses of our Electoral College system.
> Maybe the real problem isn't who voted for who, but how we've all gotten so used to seeing each other as enemies instead of neighbors who sometimes disagree. Just a thought.
Exactly. Divide and conquer. Historically it's been pretty effective.
A big chunk of those people now voicing concerns did not vote to prevent the course we are now on because "both sides are the same," or variations of that demonstrable falsehood.
Plenty of people are happy about the actions because it’s exactly what they voted for – “promises made, promises kept.” This isn’t implementing some secret agenda without warning; it’s a fulfillment of a central campaign promise.
Or making and hiding fraudulent payments.
I think it's the dumbest, high confidence kids(with big egos) in the room who agree to do shit like this.
Show me one.
I really do care that the kid is writing code because Bessent told senior Republicans in a closed-door meeting Musk et al only have read access and that through another person (Krause). If this kid is writing code, he's doing so without legal authority. This isn't a coup, it's espionage.
That's just play on words at this time
Clearly the federal government has been compromised by private citizens with unclear, or secret, affiliations to the president and his associates
Congress and the courts seem unable to repel the attack so far
Yes, some teenagers and 25 year olds are capable, and probably do in fact, write system-critical code
But having people who previously had nothing to do with the government, take over a federal system, with seemingly no experience managing those types of systems before, is very alarming
Opinion article that at least explains some of the authority that DOGE may have. DOGE is operating under U.S. Digital Service which was started by Obama, not congress, with a mission to assist other government services with technology, and may have authority via OMB and the president if the affected departs resist.
Nice to finally get some details, instead of rank speculation on all sides.
https://thehill.com/opinion/5126111-department-government-ef...
'Go haywire': Onlookers freak out as 25-year-old set loose on Treasury computer system
Unsurprisingly, they have a YOLO badge.
edit: ok, based on Wired reporting, https://github.com/markoelez must be him...
I asked CoPilot to analyze the sources and identify the individual claims, and their proximity to a 'first party source'.
Once again, there is 0 evidence this is actually happening -- there are however a lot of news organizations ready to throw their reputations away over a few 'anonymous sources' that aren't even primary.
Here is the analysis of your source, AND the linked sources in that article:
Wired: Reports that Marko Elez, a 25-year-old engineer linked to Elon Musk, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the U.S. government. The sources are unnamed, and they claim Elez has administrator-level privileges, including the ability to write code on the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System1.
Talking Points Memo: Confirms Wired's reporting, adding that Elez has already made extensive changes to the code base for the payment systems. Again, the sources are unnamed1.
The New Republic: Details that Elez has complete access to critical payment systems at the Department of the Treasury, despite being only 25 years old. The sources are unnamed, and the article mentions that senior government officials have been locked out of employee databases1.
Raw Story: Reports that Elez has been given full control over the computer code that directs Social Security payments, tax returns, and other payments owed to Americans. The sources are unnamed, and the article mentions that federal IT workers are concerned about the potential for irreversible damage to the systems2.
In summary, all the sources cited in the article are anonymous, and there are no first-party sources or direct evidence provided. This makes it difficult to verify the claims independently. The lack of named sources and concrete evidence raises questions about the credibility of the claims.
Anyway, I don't know anything about the Wired reporters but I trust Josh Marshall to not make shit up.
For what it's worth, I read the talkingpointsmemo article on this because of your statement as I take you for an actual human being who trusts someone who wrote on the topic, which is more than I can say about most of the articles so far. (https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/musk-cronies-dive-into-...)
I don't know anything about Josh Marshall but I did check his Bias Score (which I take with a grain of salt but it's at least somewhere to start with unknown actors) and it didn't raise red flags other than 'skews strongly left' and 'mostly accurate' (which is not unexpected given the subject): https://adfontesmedia.com/talking-points-memo-bias-and-relia... and https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/talking-points-memo/
However, the paragraph that Josh wrote really only makes one claim which is again not first party or 'on the record', where he stated
"I can independently confirm these details based on conversations going back to the weekend. I can further report that Elez not only has full access to these systems, he has already made extensive changes to the code base for these critical payment system."
'based on conversations going back to the weekend' is perhaps the weakest claim of the bunch of articles being analyzed here. He doesn't even bother to list the # of sources, the type of source - he is simply confirming he had a conversation during which this claim was made.
In fact, his entire post on this topic is pasted below:
"Overnight, Wired reported that, contrary to published reports that DOGE operatives at the Treasury Department are limited to “read only” access to department payment systems, this is not true. A 25-year-old DOGE operative named Marko Elez in fact has admin privileges on these critical systems, which 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. I can independently confirm these details based on conversations going back to the weekend. I can further report that Elez not only has full access to these systems, he has already made extensive changes to the code base for these critical payment system."
I am going to need a lot more than that to take these extraordinary claims at face value -- and that does not mean I am saying he is 'making things up' either. I'm willing to take it at face value he had this conversation and believes it.
It still appears that this is just a circle of people who are predisposed to dislike what Trump/DOGE are doing, that are all referencing each other (circularly) making very wild claims. Nobody seems willing to take the liability of making the claim definitively though - it's all hearsay and '.. someone said' level discourse.
This is not news. It's rumors, at best.
I'm not saying it's not true - maybe it will shake out to be true when someone actually does some reporting on the topic. For the moment, it should be getting reported as rumors rather than fact - but that doesn't seem to be happening.
I just think it's wildly irresponsible to take such flimsy claims at face value, especially when so many people are emotionally invested in this outcome.
All said though, I certainly HOPE it isn't true - as that would be an egregious oversight that I would not expect either Trump or Musk to be OK with. Frankly I can't stand Musk, but this just doesn't pass the smell test.
EDIT: Not to belabor the point, but this 'fake' story from Josh Marshall doesn't exactly instill confidence his unsourced paragraph is going to hold up to whatever standards he has set for himself:
'Failed Fact Checks “We know this now. The banks no longer loan (Donald Trump) money because he’s a terrible risk. So he goes to these (Russian) oligarchs and borrows money.” – Mostly False'
It seems the 'mostly factual' basis is due to him generally being good about sourcing, which isn't even being attempted here.
They have absolutely nothing to lose at this point, so that should be another giant red flag that everyone is banking on the word getting out and the 'myth' that Elon gave some kid write access to the most important treasury databases in the world, and in 6 months it will turn out all of this was a 'misunderstanding' and half of the country will swear up and down it was proven to be true and the only reason no one got in trouble is because Musk/Trump are corrupt and in cahoots.
Absolute madness.
Again though - I will take the journalist at his word he heard a conversation where this was stated in the paragraph he published. He is still just regurgitating third hand info.
Honestly, how hard would it be if you were in DC to just plant ANY story you want right now with this level of 'fact checking' and 'reporting'?
If you had even a semblance of prominence or just spoke authoritatively, you could go to a coffee shop near the press corps, say a bunch of inflammatory stuff, and everyone has plausible deniability... "well, all I said was I heard it said... I didn't claim it was really true I just heard it!". Then the rumor mill gets ahold of it, and every reprint lends an air of credibility to a story created out of thin air.
Not trying to disparage him or say he is doing exactly that - but the level of reporting is genuinely that flimsy, and the continued reporting as if it is true is creating a veneer of 'truthiness' or whatever the fashionable word is these days.
It's very frustrating to watch all common sense go out the window just because something bad was said anonymously about 'the bad guys'.
If it turns out there is meat here I'll be the first to admit I was wrong and this is a crazy situation - right now it looks like the odds of that are reaching 0.
I just read the article and they go to great pains to make it -seem- like they have first party confirmation and not hearsay, but it was breaking my brain trying to determine with certainty.
I just asked copilot to review the article looking for 1st party witnesses, and it said there weren't any.
Then I asked it to summarize each 'witness' from the article, whether they are first party, and if not what degree of sepearatoin they have. This is what it said:
Sure, let's break down the key witnesses and their claims:
David Lebryk: Former acting Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. He resigned after resisting granting DOGE access to the Treasury data1. His claim is based on his direct experience and position within the Treasury Department, making him a first party witness.
Ron Wyden: The highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. He expressed concerns about the potential misuse of the data by DOGE1. Wyden is a second party witness, as he is commenting on the situation based on his oversight role but not direct involvement.
Anonymous AP Sources: Two people familiar with the situation spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. They claim that DOGE has gained access to sensitive Treasury data1. These sources are second party witnesses, as they have indirect knowledge of the situation.
X User (@rayinsideout): Revealed names of alleged DOGE employees who accessed the Treasury payment system. Musk accused this user of committing a crime by sharing private information2. This user is a third party witness, as they are relaying information they claim to have obtained from other sources.
Scott Bessent: Treasury Secretary who granted DOGE access to the data. His actions are central to the claims, but he hasn't made public statements about the specifics of the access3. Bessent is a first party witness due to his direct involvement in the decision.
So it sounds like all of this is based of David Lebryk's claims, and the media contorting themselves to make this a 'thing'.
I am willing to hear actual evidence, but this list doesn't sway me and this feels a lot like "things people want to believe" more than "things that happened".
Time will tell I guess.
So the articles quite literally has 0 first party witnesses. Yet they are super-duper-certain that this person has 'read-write' and is rewriting COBOL on the fly. Give me a break, this is worst than "Weekly World News" -- it may as well say:
"BatBoy Terrorizing Treasury Database! Picture on Page 5!"
Normally that would make you question the validity of everything Copilot told you about the article.
I was asking it to check the sources because I found every article was doing exactly what was described, and was starting to doubt my own ability to trace the story because it was just going in circles.
So it acknowledging exactly what I observed, and adding additional context (which it was clear about) is not exactly a mark against it.
If I simply asked it to do a thing and it hallucinated something, sure. If I hadn't already done the work manually, sure.
That isn't close to what is happening here though. It correctly identified the issues in the reporting, and attempted to add additional context and still found there was no first party source. Which is all true.
David Lebryk and/or Scott Bessent could confirm this story right now and put everything to bed. Neither has anything else to lose. They haven't.
I'm sure someone will say "but what if Trump has them KILLED" or some nonsense like that -- they already came out and spoke against him, and if you have to resort to that kind of imaginary threat and use nothing but 2nd and 3rd party anonymous sources to make the claim.... you are floating a 'conspiracy theory'.
Sure, and in the list of things that have happened, is them shuttering USAID (https://www.usaid.gov) over the weekend
And using the DOJ to threaten people with legal action, for disclosing the names of some of DOGE's members
"Only having" read access, is already a huge red flag, especially because of the way it was attained (illegally), and because of the people involved (private citizens with unclear affiliations to the federal government)
This is not just a small understanding about read vs write access
It's a discussion about a bunch of anonymous sources and 'someone close to said' making extraordinary claims.
These claims need evidence - and "but I don't like what is happening with the Agency for International Development" is entirely irrelevant.
You are right that "This is not just a small understanding about read vs write access" though; it is a deliberate media blitz to insert the idea that this is happening into the cultural consciousness with absolutely 0 evidence.
If someone chimes in with some facts that can be validated from first party sources then I'll be happy to re-evaluate. This is just fear mongering as it is written today.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
Quite literally, no. Elez (the 25-year old) reports to Musk. There is nobody elected above him.
Bessent, hours before this broke, claimed he "signed off on a plan to give 'read-only' access to the payment system to a team led by Tom Krause" [1]. This kid allegedly had write access. And he doesn't report to Krause. He should be getting arrested on espionage charges.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/03/bessent-musk-doge-t...
But you said "best and brightest" so I'm assuming you're trolling.
I mean Elon isn't going to personally do the work as department head...
Where? Trump gave Elon SGE status, nothing more.
Also, there are statues that Trump can’t unilaterally void. That isn’t practically relevant for Trump. But it is legally relevant for these kids—they’re illegally accessing government servers.
> no different in my opinion than the CIA hiring confidential sources or the FBI hiring contractors
If the CIA or FBI were breaking into the Treasury, we’d have an analogy.
And even if this were understood to have been what voting trump meant, that is only 77M out of 334M people in America.
"that is only 77M out of 334M people in America" What's your point here? Our system is set up to give outsized power to whoever secures a majority of the electors. There may be a better alternative but are you complaining about the system being flawed or complaining that the numbers didn't go your way? The rest of us also had to put up with decisions under previous administrations that we didn't appreciate despite only a similar number of people actually voting for the administration.
That's actually a little rich in this case, considering how few Republicans accept the results of the 2020 election.
But having a SpaceX engineer start a rewrite is... bad?
I freak out when some minor component of my company becomes abandonware. When no one can or wants to read or work on the codebase, it's _time for it to die_. Either this good news, or you have no experience maintaining existing critical software infrastructure.
As for the "unelected" argument... Did anyone ever elect any of the software engineers who worked on this codebase? It has always been federal employees appointed by federal agencies. Some acronyms changed.
I'd love to know more about what the plan is - but as a older software engineer "young smart kids attempt to start maintaining ancient abandoned but important codebase" is good news, not bad news. It's what we beg for in Slack all day long.
If there is atleast a good supervision, then sure it might work.
One of the other guys won the Vesuvius Challenge, so I’d say probably.
You know that's consider a bad thing in serious software engineering teams, right?
Armchair quarterbacking engineering decisions with little to no information is not something I'm in the habit of doing.
People complain about Facebook's move fast and break things philosophy whenever something bad happens, completely ignoring the fact that they are a trillion dollar corporation that 20 years ago did not exist.
Sometime you just have to get rid of the guardrails and YOLO it
Moving fast and breaking things only works when the things you're breaking are low stakes. Grandma not getting her daily pic dump of her grandson is not the same as grandma not getting her groceries.
And what if your assumption about printing checks is wrong? I find no basis for that assumption, by the way.
There are simply no mechanisms in place to do what you're saying, nor does there appear to be any willingness to correct errors, given the desire to cut spending. Missed payments may be a feature, not a bug.
> Missed payments may be a feature, not a bug.
> not legally, and certainly not in a timely manner.
Bad faith magic wand waving, these arguments do not have substance. People/bots are on a bandwagon against change many have been calling for years for. Our treasury system NEEDS an overhaul and there are much bigger problems with this admin to make an issue out of.
The Mexican cartels for example do provide aid in predominantly poor parts of the country but there are still many who would say that overall these organizations provide more harm than good.
The US is providing some resources for causes that you and other's support (presumably with a much higher "success" rate than the cartels) but they have also historically funded and perpetuated things that many are not happy with (various conflicts in the middle east come to mind).
Some of us wanted to see dramatic reform and we feel that claims like "grandma is going to starve because she won't get her groceries" are really just an attempt to connect with emotions around the ordeal rather than an honest attempt to point out flaws or discuss potential drawbacks with the current approach.
There are substantially better ways to solve this problem, so the fact that those better methods aren't being tried screams ignorance and inexperience, which is a problem for critical payment systems.
and you justify this because a platform for serving targeted ads has popularized the idea?
and you don't see a difference between a social network and our countries payment systems?
i'm just kind of shocked and disappointed by this, as i'm sure you're not the only one who perceives the world this way..
Sometimes a system needs a good shock to improve. And at the end of the day, what is the absolute worst that can happen? Cause the upside of this working is definitely worth the risk in my eyes.
then your eyes aren't open. a moment of thought would easily produce outcomes that dont match the risk.
Bond payments to major bond holders are not sent out. At that point, the US can no longer be trusted and the dollar stops being the de facto world currency.
Is that bad enough for you?
One single missed interest payment to Treasury bond holders would be a default, something that has never happened to the US before. Our credit rating would be downgraded, investors all over the world would liquidate their US Treasury bonds, and our borrowing costs would skyrocket, both for government and commercial/consumer loans.
This instantly causes a recession, far worse than what we saw in 2008. A US Treasury default would have catastrophic consequences.
This is one of many catastrophic scenarios possible when messing with a government payment system that handles trillions of dollars in payments.
Any money saved by cancelling payments is going to be used to give people wealthier than you or I a tax cut. Is that really worth the risk?
This might work when the thing you are constantly breaking is optional for me to use. I will keep using as long as the value it gives me outweighs the breakage pain. If you break it enough times, I might just get fed up with it and not use it anymore, or go with a competitor. It is a risk that YOU are taking with your product, that sometimes will work and sometimes will not.
In the case of the government social apparatus being handled by techie kids in crunch time, THEY are not the ones taking the risk, but the population that depends on those systems. There is a reason why those systems are analysed ad infinitum before replacing them or changing them. And yes, they evolve slower than modern tech systems, but most of the time there is good reason for it.
They might be ok with a release in production with a couple of bugs and come back on Monday and say -oops- on your morning standup. This is something that should not be acceptable when we are talking about services that millions of people's livelihoods depend on.
They can YOLO it all they want, in their private endeavour, with their (optional to me) product. They do NOT get to YOLO it with my life's critical things.
There's a reason why the people constructing bridges and nuclear power plants don't "move fast and break things" even if the people building a fundamentally unimportant website can do that.