A DOGE staffer broke Treasury policy by emailing unencrypted personal data
Court documents filed Friday in an ongoing lawsuit against the US Treasury Department reveal that a 25-year-old staffer for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) violated Treasury policy by sending a spreadsheet that had personal information to two other members of the Trump administration, reports Bloomberg.
The staffer, a former employee at Elon Musk’s X and SpaceX companies named Marko Elez, had been tasked with combing through the Treasury’s payments system, but resigned in early February over racist social media posts that were linked to him. DOGE has since rehired him to work at the Social Security Administration.
19 state attorneys general sued the Treasury Department in February over DOGE’s access. Since then, the department has claimed that Elez was “mistakenly” given read and write access. DOGE’s access to its systems has been limited by a court order that the government is trying to have modified, Bloomberg writes.
According to the Treasury’s Friday filing, the department analyzed Elez’s laptop and email account, finding that he “did not make any alterations or changes to Bureau payment systems,” but did email a spreadsheet containing “a name (a person or an entity), a transaction type, and an amount of money” to two unnamed officials at the US General Services Administration.
The Treasury writes that the document is low-risk, as it didn’t contain sensitive identifiers like a social security number or birth date. However, it says Elez violated policy by not encrypting the document or getting proper approval to send it.
In a separate court document from Friday, the states suing the Treasury said that the results of the analysis “do nothing to allay any of the concerns expressed by the court in its opinion about the rushed and chaotic nature of the Treasury DOGE Team onboarding process.”