Elez resigned from the Treasury Department a day later, after The Wall Street Journal surfaced racist social media posts, and Treasury officials said he has not been reinstated to his previous role.
The disclosure came in a series of affidavits filed in federal court in New York, where the Trump administration is fighting to lift a judge’s order that barred any political appointees from accessing Treasury’s payment system, which manages the flow of $5 trillion of spending each year. On Tuesday, the judge presiding over the case clarified the original order to ensure that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other Senate-confirmed political appointees could access the system, but maintained restrictions on other political appointees and individuals affiliated with DOGE.
The affidavits make clear that the DOGE team initially came into the system with plans to block foreign aid payments — following an executive order by President Donald Trump — and to automate some of its functions.
Treasury officials wrote that they were directed to identify and flag payment files associated with certain accounts for foreign aid, including the Department of Health and Human Services refugee assistance. The goal, they wrote, was to allow the State Department to determine whether the disbursements should continue to be processed based on Trump’s executive order halting foreign aid.
Thomas Krause, another Musk aide who is the leader of Treasury’s DOGE team, also shed new light on the review he is conducting of the agency’s payment process in his declaration. Krause is the CEO of Cloud Software Groups who is an unpaid Treasury employee who leads the agency’s DOGE operation.
Krause said that he provides the U.S. DOGE Service at the White House with “regular updates on the team’s progress” and receives “high-level policy direction from them.”
But Krause emphasized that he is a employee of Treasury. The Trump administration has also named him to take over the duties of Treasury’s fiscal assistant secretary, a powerful role that oversees the federal payments system, but he said he had not yet started that position.
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.
Bessent has publicly and privately said that the DOGE team at his agency had “read-only” access to federal payment data and did not possess the power to alter systems. And Treasury has made similar representations in court filings and in correspondence to Congress, though Democrats have slammed what they say are shifting and unclear explanations about the extent of the DOGE team’s access to Treasury systems.
WIRED Magazine reported on Feb. 4 that Elez had the ability to write code on two Treasury payment systems.
After Elez’s resignation last week, Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Musk all said that he should be rehired by DOGE. A Treasury official said in a court filing that as of Tuesday Elez was not employed at the agency.