Vice President JD Vance on Friday morning called for the reinstatement of a Department of Government Efficiency staff member who had resigned after being linked to racist posts he made on X under a pseudonym — a position endorsed hours later by President Trump.
Mr. Vance’s declaration on X came after The Wall Street Journal linked a pseudonymous account on the social platform with Marko Elez, a former SpaceX and X employee who had joined Elon Musk’s cost-cutting effort that is scrutinizing government spending. Mr. Elez resigned on Thursday, after The Journal reported that he had written posts last year declaring, “I was racist before it was cool” and “normalize Indian hate.”
“I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” wrote Mr. Vance, whose wife, Usha Vance, is the daughter of Indian immigrants. “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back.”
Mr. Vance’s comments ignored the inherent contradiction in dismissing a young staff member’s racist comments as a youthful indiscretion at the same time he was part of a team being granted vast powers to slash billions of dollars in government programs and spending.
President Trump, asked about the calls for reinstatement later Friday at a news conference with Japan’s prime minister, said he was not familiar with Mr. Elez’s posts. But after confirming with Mr. Vance, who was in the audience, that the vice president had called for Mr. Elez’s reinstatement, Mr. Trump said agreed with whatever the position his Vice President took.
Mr. Elez did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but soon after Mr. Trump’s remarks, Mr. Musk posted online that he would be returning.
“He will be brought back,” Mr. Musk wrote on X. “To err is human, to forgive divine.”
Mr. Musk had appeared to favor Mr. Elez’s reinstatement, and led a campaign calling for the author of the Journal story to be fired for publishing private information. The Journal did not publish private information and simply linked Mr. Elez’s pseudonymous posts to his real name.
On X, Mr. Musk posed a question to his more than 215 million followers: “Bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym?”
The answer, from 78 percent of the more than 385,000 users who cast votes in the poll, was a resounding yes.
On Friday, Bloomberg reported that another DOGE staffer, Edward Coristine, was fired from a previous job at a data security firm after an investigation into the leaking of internal information.
Before joining the government, Mr. Coristine was fired in June 2022 from an internship at Path, an Arizona-based data security company, after “an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure,” the company said in a statement obtained by The New York Times on Friday.
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