A young ally of Elon Musk and former Treasury Department appointee was accidentally given the ability to make changes to a sensitive payment database, an error that a civil servant said in a court filing was quickly corrected.
Career civil servants at the Treasury Department, including Joseph Gioeli, the deputy commissioner at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, provided sworn statements in response to a lawsuit challenging the access Mr. Musk’s government efficiency team gained to sensitive federal payment systems.
The filings offer a more detailed recounting of the Treasury decision to grant Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley software executive, and Marko Elez, a 25-year-old former employee of X, entry to the payment systems, which distribute more than $5 trillion a year on behalf of the government. The Treasury Department and White House have repeatedly said that Mr. Elez and Mr. Krause were given only “read-only” access to the data, which includes Americans’ bank account and Social Security numbers.
In a court filing, however, Mr. Gioeli said that Treasury staff discovered on Feb. 6 that Mr. Elez had been given “read/write permissions instead of read-only” to one of the payment databases the day before. Mr. Gioeli said that Treasury staff revoked his additional access and are investigating the incident.
“To the best of our knowledge, Mr. Elez never knew of the fact that he briefly had read/write permissions for the S.P.S. database, and never took any action to exercise the ‘write’ privileges,” Mr. Gioeli said.
Mr. Elez resigned from the Treasury Department on Feb. 6, after the discovery of racist social media posts, though President Trump has said he should be reinstated. Mr. Krause was the only other Trump appointee given access to the system, with the ability to read data initially retrieved by Mr. Elez, according to the court filings.
In the filings, the career Treasury staff and Mr. Gioeli discuss steps they took to mitigate potential cybersecurity threats posed by granting access to the sensitive systems, including monitoring what Mr. Elez did. They also describe a new process Treasury created to monitor and help stop payments that the Trump administration is trying to block.
Representatives from Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency gaining entry to Treasury’s payment systems has alarmed Democrats, who have warned about potential privacy breaches and blocked spending. A federal judge in New York on Saturday blocked Trump appointees from the systems, though a subsequent order loosened the restrictions.
Speaking in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Mr. Musk said his goal at the Treasury Department was to better track payments across the government to see if they were fraudulent.
“What we’re talking about here, we’re really just talking about adding common sense controls that should be present, that haven’t been present,” he said.
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