DOGE's Marko Elez is back on U.S. payroll

Yahoo

29-03-2025

A member of Elon Musk's DOGE team — fired from the Treasury Department after the discovery of racist social media posts — has been working for weeks on sensitive systems at the Department of Health and Human Services, new government disclosures revealed Saturday.
Marko Elez, whom Musk vowed to rehire after Trump allies pushed back on his termination, rejoined the administration in February as a Labor Department employee before he was detailed on March 5 to HHS, the administration acknowledged earlier this week in answers to a court-ordered demand for information in connection with a pending lawsuit.
In addition to HHS, Elez is detailed to the Department of Government Efficiency core staff at the White House, as well as at least four other government agencies, according to the documents filed Saturday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
Elez, 25, now has access to systems that help enforce child support orders, Medicare and Medicaid payments, and HHS contracts, the court filings indicate. Spokespeople for the White House, the Labor Department and HHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment Saturday.
The details about Elez were included in the most detailed description to date of DOGE's access to some of the federal government's most sensitive databases. They were disclosed after a federal judge required the administration to deliver details about DOGE's work as part of a lawsuit brought in February on behalf of several labor unions and nonprofit groups.
The suit contends that federal agencies have given the Musk-led group unlawful access to sensitive private information. U.S. District Judge John Bates denied the unions' request for a restraining order blocking DOGE's access to such data, but the judge agreed to force the administration to reveal more details about DOGE operations.
In a court filing Saturday, lawyers pressing the suit from the liberal watchdog group Democracy Forward and law firm Relman Colfax argued that the Trump administration's responses to the discovery requests authorized by Bates improperly excluded information about people publicly identified as DOGE staffers in news reports and interviews.
Still, the details about the DOGE team — and its access to a wide range of sensitive databases — were some of the most expansive to date.
Among the revelations: DOGE's Luke Farritor has access to 12 sensitive systems, including those that handle Medicare and Medicaid payments, contracts, acquisitions, National Institutes of Health grants and general HHS grants.
One employee detailed to the General Services Administration, Kyle Schutt, has access to a database of 'Unaccompanied Alien Children.' Amy Gleason, identified by the White House as DOGE's 'acting administrator' despite questions about when and whether she is running the operation, has been working on efforts to modernize Medicare and Medicaid payment systems.
The filing indicates that Gleason 'exercises authority over detailing and deploying DOGE Employees to other agencies.'
'Whether an agency chooses to onboard a [DOGE] employee, or accept a detail, is up to that agency,' the administration emphasized.
During Elez's initial stint at Treasury, he violated the agency's information security policies by sending a spreadsheet containing names and payments information to officials at the General Services Administration, according to a court filing in another suit pending in New York.