Krause said Treasury agreed to begin on Jan. 26 a 4-6 week study of the federal payment system with the goal of reducing fraud and having the system work “more efficiently and securely.”
The project “remains in its initial stages,” he said, and the Treasury DOGE team was still in the process of receiving access to the agency’s vast payment databases and source code when the other member of his team, Elez, resigned last week.
Krause said he learned from Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service that “there was briefly an error that provided Mr. Elez read/write access to the [Secure Payment System], but that Mr. Elez did not access that system during that time, and was likely unaware that he had any such read/write access.”
Joseph Gioeli, a deputy commissioner of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and career Treasury employee, wrote that department officials developed various safeguards to mitigate the risks associated with granting Elez and the DOGE team unusually broad access to multiple systems, which included limiting his powers to “read-only” access. They also restricted read-only queries of the payment systems to “low-utilization time periods” to minimize the possibility of operational disruptions.
“The Bureau used several cybersecurity tools to monitor Mr. Elez’s usage and continuously log his activity,” Gioeli said.
But Gioeli said that on the morning of Feb. 6, Treasury officials discovered that Elez’s access to one of the systems — the Secure Payment System — “on February 5 had mistakenly been configured with read/write permissions instead of read-only.
“A forensic investigation was immediately initiated by database administrators to review all activities performed on that server and database,” Gioeli wrote, adding that the “initial investigation” did not find that Elez took any actions to exercise the power to modify anything within the database.
“The Bureau is in the process of reviewing the logs of Mr. Elez’s activity on his Bureau laptop, and this review remains ongoing,” he added.